Now that she’d taken a moment to stop and think, tension crept along her spine and into her shoulders. No emergency transponders, no one knew their location, limited essential supplies, the possibility that Graydon wasn’t human, and the question over who had been the target of that obviously-not-accidental crash and why… She tightened her hand around the MRE.
Mae didn’t want to sit around and hope for the best. Especially when her commanding officer might not be who he was supposed to be and someone had clearly orchestrated this situation.
No, she never had been good at letting things unfold. One way or another, she’d find some way to get herself out of this situation—sooner rather than later.
Chapter Three
Onboard the Imojenna, in orbit around Nadira
Rian checked the onscreen readouts of the planet below him one last time. Exactly what he’d been hoping for. No official spaceport, no intergalactic trade center, and so little IPC presence, it verified the government didn’t give two scum rats about this out-of-the-way rock.
When he’d noted the list of planets in this quadrant of space earlier, something about this particular rock had tugged at his shadowed memories. Usually he went out of his way to avoid anything that risked dragging him back down into that particular darkness. But if he was ever going to get anywhere against the frecking Reidar, he couldn’t spend the rest of his life running from any clues or places that reminded him of those lost years.
They’d been in need of a supply stop, so he’d ordered Lianna to take them down on Nadira. Maybe once he arrived, he’d recognize something that would tell him why this planet had set his Reidar senses tingling.
“What kind of backwater world have you brought us to now?” his sister, Zahli, asked from where she stood just behind his chair.
He rotated his seat to face her. “A safe backwater world. We’ll land, re-supply, get some fresh air, and then we’re back onship in twelve hours. We’ve still got a few weeks until we reach Barasa.”
“Only twelve hours?” She arched a brow at him, the same way she always did when she was about to launch into an argument. At least these days he wasn’t the only one who ended up on the receiving end of that look. He’d seen her direct it at her fiancé, Tannin, a handful of times. Unfortunately for his ship’s tech analyst, the guy hadn’t quite worked out what that look meant yet.
“We’ve already been traveling for weeks, Rian, taking the most convoluted, ridiculous route to Barasa I’ve ever seen. We could have been there by now if—”
“If we wanted to make it easy for the Reidar to follow us and blow our collective asses out of the ether.” He stood and tugged on the thick wristband of beads he wore. “Feel free to take your boyfriend and leave any time you want. If you’re onship, you do things my way. And my way is the one that keeps us alive.”
She huffed a sigh and spun, stalking out of the bridge and then clomping down the stairs, her muttering drifting back up to him as she went.
“Lianna, put us on a trajectory to land somewhere near the markets in Liese. It’s the biggest trade center on the planet.”
“Yes, Captain. But can I just say, Zahli might have a point. We’ve come a fairly roundabout way toward Barasa. I could plot a more direct route from here. It’ll cut the remaining travel time in half—”
“I know we need to get to Barasa to find out what happened to Tannin’s friend, but we won’t be doing anything if we get caught by the bad guys. And flying in along the usual routes, announcing ourselves as we go, will result in exactly that. The travel plans stay as is—we stop here for supplies, take the long way, and land somewhere discreet.”
She nodded and turned her attention to the navs onscreen in front of her.
He swallowed over a sigh as he escaped the bridge, leaving his nav-engineer to take them dirtside.
Not for the first time, he questioned just how much new information he was likely to get out of exploring the Reidar lead on Barasa. His crew thought he was being all kinds of benevolent by promising Tannin they’d follow up on the disappearance of his childhood friend. Truthfully, he could give less than a freck about the guy. He was probably dead as a black star.
Hell, maybe he was being too careful. But the damned aliens had a habit of popping up when he least expected it, and they were frecking hard to kill. Not to mention, they had the IPC authorities and UAFA on the Imojenna’s ass for that whole inconvenient wanted-intergalactic-terrorists thing—thanks to one of the head scum-bastard aliens putting a warrant out on them for allegedly hacking into some data stream. Okay, yeah, they’d hacked the data stream. But since the Reidar weren’t exactly human, the laws of man didn’t apply.
Maybe he’d be less pissed if they’d finally uncovered the Reidar’s base of operations. But the last location they’d discovered had been a waystation where the aliens stopped after coming through a black hole, presumably from their own alternate universe. He’d since come up with a new theory that wherever the chief scumbag was holed up, that was the bastard’s HQ. All he had to do was find it and destroy it…the same thing he’d be trying to do since before the Assimilation Wars ended.
The sweet scent of moon jasmine reached him as he approached the galley and common room. Jezus. Ella and her frecking Jasmynah tea again. Ever since the priestess had gotten his sister to buy the stuff for her, half his damned ship smelled like some Arynian temple.
The scent had a way of seeping into his pores, tendrils drifting deep within him, making him wake in the small hours of the morning with the taste of it in the back of his throat.
Would she taste just as sweet?
The question haunted him in his weakest moments. But he didn’t want to know, didn’t really want her. She had enchanted him from the first day he’d met her. But that didn’t mean he had to let it affect him. He didn’t have room in his life to feel anything. Having Zahli on the Imojenna already made him vulnerable, and he didn’t plan on exposing himself any more than that.
His steps shortened as he crossed the hatchway into the galley, but he didn’t allow himself to slow in the slightest. At the large table in the middle of the room, Ella sat across from Nyah, a family friend who, until recently, had been looking after his family’s house. Both women had mugs of gently steaming tea in front of them.
With Nyah onboard, the Imojenna was at full capacity for the first time ever—more than full, since to make room Tannin had moved into Zahli’s cabin, which Rian had been just thrilled about. Okay, he was glad his sister was happy, but he didn’t need to see the two lovers being all mushy and getting heavy with the PDA every day.
“Don’t get too comfortable, we’re about to land.” He opened the coldstore but didn’t find anything to drink besides water. “I’m giving the crew twelve hours offship and then we’ll be on our way.”
“I’d really like a week offship.” Nyah glanced at the viewport running the length of the galley. “But I’ll take what I can get.”
Ella sipped at her tea with graceful, measured movements. “Thank you for the offer, but I will remain on the ship.”
He crossed his arms and stepped closer to the table. “You stayed on the ship the last two times we stopped for supplies. You need to go out and get some fresh air, see something other than the Imojenna’s bulkheads. We’ve still got a few weeks of traveling, and I don’t want you flipping out because you’ve gone shipbound crazy.”
She shot him an even look over the rim of her cup. “The concept of ‘fresh air’ is a psychological one. There’s nothing wrong with the air on this ship. And I assure you, I am not in danger of flipping out.”
“Do you have some weird phobia about going out in unfamiliar places?” He leaned down and braced his hands against the surface of the table in a way that would have intimidated anyone else. But apparently it did crap-all to unsettle Ella. “Are you going to make me order you to leave my ship for a few damned hours, princess?”
She inclined her head. “It is your prerogative to do so if you feel it i
s strictly necessary.”
Always so damned correct. She never said a thing wrong, her words and tone designed to soothe and beguile whatever poor moron she was talking to.
He straightened and crossed his arms. “The weather where we’re going on Nadira is a balmy eighty-five degrees, so when we land, you’re going to go for a nice long walk and take in some of that fresh air you don’t need.”
Ella inclined her head, expression serene as though she didn’t care either way…which just jacked his temper like usual. He spun and stalked out of the galley, back up to the bridge without the drink he’d intended on getting. Not that it mattered; he wanted something hard-core, and water just wasn’t going to cut it.
“Any messages?” he asked Lianna as he slid back into his seat and glanced over the landing data displayed on his screen.
In his peripheral vision, he caught the exasperated look she sent him.
“No, Lieutenant Marshal Mae Petros has not contacted us yet. If she had, I would have told you right away. Just like the other half dozen times you asked.”
Goddamn. He leaned back in his chair, shoving his hair back from his forehead and then dragging a hand down his face. Mae was several hours overdue for contact. He didn’t even know if she’d made it to her fake posting on the Swift Brion.
Had something happened to her already? Maybe he shouldn’t have sent her after Graydon. Mae was good—the woman could definitely take care of herself and then some. But the Reidar weren’t exactly a rogue soldier, black-market trader, or pirate. They were a whole other level of psychopathic. They’d proven that time and again, especially when they’d recently tried to steal his ship. Which just so happened to be when Zander had been onboard for a short passage.
At the time, he’d taken it for coincidence and nothing more. But after finding Zander on the Reidar list of names, he’d started thinking and hadn’t liked what he’d come up with.
Sure, Zander had stood shoulder to shoulder with him and held the line when the group of aliens had stormed the ship to kidnap Ella, but had the guy been placed there by the chief Reidar scumbag to gather information? But if that had been a fake Zander alien, why not snatch Ella? The guy had stayed on the ship for another entire rotation after they fended off the attack. An entire rotation when he could have gathered jezus knew what intel on Rian and his crew.
He took a breath to shove the futile rage back down.
The lack of perspective was starting to do his head in. Which was why he needed Mae to come through and deliver Zander to him. And if she didn’t contact them soon, he was going to have to make some hard choices. Forget his plans for Barasa, turn the ship around to go after Mae, and piss off his sister—and probably the entire crew—when he broke his pseudo-promise to Tannin about following up on his friend’s disappearance? Or hope Mae had a handle on things and stayed his course?
With people disappearing all over the place, was this unofficial war he’d declared costing too much?
He could count on one hand the number of people outside his ship he trusted, and Mae was one of them. If it wasn’t for her, if she hadn’t cared about him so much, he wouldn’t be sitting on the Imojenna today.
And Zander…well, after thinking basic training was a special kind of torment, they’d spent nearly a year together surviving the dead zones on Minnea. Their brotherhood had been forged in blood and misery.
The Imojenna plunged into the planet’s atmosphere and the engines roared as they switched over to heavy-air thrusters. Wispy vapor cleared from the viewport as they got lower and the landmass came into view.
Lianna finalized their landing position, and a few minutes later they were setting down in a dirt field designated as the intergalactic spaceport for the capital city, Liese. There were no other ships present, and the only security was a small box of a gatehouse, which seemed pointless since there was no gate, and the fence around the spaceport was made out of uneven lengths of wood.
They got the ship offline and then made their way down to the cargo hold, where the rest of the crew were waiting. He brushed by them to hit the hatch release and turned to survey his people.
At least it looked like Ella had decided to follow his orders. She stood next to Nyah, waiting just behind the others to disembark. The two women seemed to have become close since Nyah had joined them. And he couldn’t work out why in the goddamn hell that made him feel tight under the collar.
“You know when I say twelve hours, I mean twelve hours,” he said over the low grind of the hatchway lowering. “If you’re even a minute late, I will take off without you. So unless you plan on making a living on this boondocks of a world, I suggest you get your asses back here in time.”
There was a chorus of “yes, Captain” as the hatchway hit the ground with a slight clunk. Rian waited for most of the crew to pass and then fell into step beside Lianna.
Callan rubbed his hands together as they stepped out into the sunshine. “Let’s go see what kind of trouble we can get us in the next twelve hours.”
Trouble was exactly what he didn’t want. But where Reidar were found, problems soon followed. And as he stepped off the end of the ramp, Rian’s shoulders tightened up, his senses telling him there was something here.
Whatever his damaged mind was trying to tell him about Nadira, he had twelve hours to work it out.
Chapter Four
Tocarra
Zander bent to add another log to the fire and tried damn hard to pretend he wasn’t watching Lieutenant Marshal Petros as she crossed the clearing back toward the crumpled shuttle.
Now what’s she up to? The lieutenant paused a few meters away from the wreck, and even from where he sat Zander could see her squaring her shoulders. She clearly didn’t want to go back into the ship—and who could blame her? Though the wreck wouldn’t shift far from where it’d landed, it was unstable, and going back in risked further injury. So what could be so important that she’d decided to force herself inside?
In the few short hours he’d spent with the woman, he’d come to see she had an iron will and no-nonsense attitude. Yet these qualities were underscored by a quick, if not cutting, sense of humor. She wouldn’t be one to take things lying down, and in a situation like this, it was exactly what he needed in an admiral’s assistant.
While eating his beef medley MRE—which had been bad, but he’d eaten worse—he’d replayed the day’s events in his mind. An attempted knifing followed by a shuttle crash…two near-fatal situations in one day.
He’d never considered himself a paranoid son of a bitch, but important essentials missing from the survival gear, too? Anyone would start thinking someone was out to get them. The only problem was, he couldn’t come up with a single reason why or an obvious culprit.
He’d considered running the facts by the lieutenant, seeing what her thoughts on the matter were. But although they’d formed a decent working relationship in the last few hours, he didn’t actually know one damn thing about her, apart from what had been in her personnel files. For all he knew, she could be the one trying to off him.
His conscience gave a vicious kick to his logic at the notion. Part of him didn’t want to believe the worst of her. But she’d turned up just in time for things to take a turn toward dangerously bizarre. Added to the fact that she’d transferred from UAFA back to the IPC—which was a career move no one in the history of anyone ever actually made—it all looked suspicious.
The Universal Armed Forces Agency paid better, didn’t keep their soldiers pressed under a thumb of strict military regimes, and gave their agents more personal freedom. So it made no sense anyone would leave all that to return to the, by comparison, archaic IPC. And though UAFA were supposed to be a privately owned, autonomous military with allegiance to those with the most money, he’d heard rumors that they were responsible for orchestrating more than a few “accidents” to remove certain people and manipulate governments to their advantage.
While he didn’t consider himself an important political
pawn, the half-baked idea that Petros was still working for UAFA and had actually come here to remove him from somebody else’s equation surfaced momentarily in his mind.
But even if Petros was a UAFA agent sent to kill him, after the first two attempts were made to look like a robbery and a shuttle crash, doing something like simply stabbing him in the chest seemed rather redundant. No, if his suspicions about her proved correct, she’d no doubt stab him in the back.
What a damned mess. He had no proof, and he also had no evidence that Petros was anything other than a career soldier who, rather unusually, hadn’t liked working for UAFA. He hadn’t made it to the rank of captain admiral at the comparatively young age of thirty-five by jumping to conclusions. The best thing he could do for the time being was watch and wait for someone to show their hand.
He shifted his attention to Jaren, who’d fallen into a doze. Maybe sleep was the best kindness he could offer the kid right now, but he worried that the drowsiness was indicative of something more serious going on, so he’d been waking him up at regular intervals to check his responsiveness.
“I’ll keep an eye on him, sir,” Nazari offered as he gently pressed his fingers into Jaren’s wrist to check his pulse. His heartbeat seemed regular, if not a little slow. But since he wasn’t a doctor, he had no idea what that meant.
“Thanks, Sergeant.”
He stood and stretched, catching sight of the lieutenant as she clambered up the side of the shuttle and into the dark, gaping hole. Whatever she was after, his sense of duty to the people serving under him wouldn’t let him leave her to do it on her own, no matter his uncertainties.
Stopping at the pile of bags, he dug out a flashlight and shrugged out of his stiff dress jacket. He tugged his tie loose and attacked the first few studs on his shirt as he approached the shuttle before pausing to roll up his sleeves. Not much better, but practical. What I wouldn’t do for a battle dress uniform right about now. Being stuck in this damn clown suit grated on his temper.
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