by Natalie Grey
DRAGON’S NEMESIS
The Dragon Corps, Book 7
NATALIE GREY
ALSO BY NATALIE GREY
SHADOWS OF MAGIC
Bound Sorcery
Blood Sorcery
Bright Sorcery
WRITING AS MOIRA WATSON
Shadowborn
Shadowforged
Shadow’s End
Shadow’s Oath
Daughter of Ashes
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Epilogue
PROLOGUE
“SO, IT’S SETTLED, THEN?” At ease in his leather chair, Julian Black gave a practiced smile and held out his hand to shake on the deal.
Eliza Thayer hesitated, biting her lip in indecision. At twenty-seven, she was one of the most junior senators, and unprepared for the level of wining and dining businesspeople apparently did when they had money on the line. This sleek ship was like nothing she’d ever seen before. It had leather chairs, a full bar, an excellent staff, and—apparently—kitchens to rival some of the best restaurants on Seneca.
The thing was, she’d already been in favor of the measure Julian wanted her to back. He hadn’t really needed to pull out all the stops for her, but when she’d prevaricated—having been trained, of course, never to promise businesspeople anything—he’d insisted she come join him for a private meeting.
She had intended to explain the truth to him when she got here, but it had all been a whirl of fine wines and steaks—real steak, something she never had the money for, herself—and Julian seemed to talk without ever shutting up long enough for Eliza to get a word in edgewise and explain herself.
She liked the Advanced Terraforming Initiative, she always had. It was a good idea. Companies bid for contracts to terraform planets that had once been deemed uninhabitable, and if they succeeded, they got certain tax privileges. If they failed, the Alliance wasn’t on the hook for anything.
More planets for very little cost—very little, indeed, when one factored in that each new planet would create yet more companies and allow humanity’s ranks to swell once again. Eliza had always been of the opinion that more worlds meant more security. Who knew what was out here in the darkness?
No, the problem was that Senator Maryam Samuels had stridently opposed the measure. Eliza’s lips twisted bitterly at the thought. Senator Samuels had been her idol once, back when they all thought she was really serious about her anti-corruption tirades. She’d come to see Eliza personally and had talked earnestly with her about the potential pitfalls of the bill, and Eliza had come out of the meeting starstruck, not really understanding what was wrong with the initiative but determined to make Senator Samuels happy.
And then Maryam Samuels turned out to be a fraud whose good deeds were blotted out by her own corruption—not to mention torture, blackmail, assassination, and more.
Eliza had hung onto far too many conflicting opinions since the trial. If Maryam Samuels was untrustworthy and a liar, did that make everything she said wrong? Or could she trust that the ATI really was a bad idea, for reasons she didn’t quite understand?
“Senator Thayer?” Julian was looking a bit bemused.
Senator Samuels wouldn’t like this meeting, but Senator Samuels had done far, far worse. And Eliza had already intended to vote for this bill, anyway. With a sense of recklessness, she ignored Julian’s outstretched hand and picked up her wine glass, holding it up to clink against his.
“It’s settled,” she said. “I’ll be voting for the Advanced Terraforming Initiative, and I’ll speak to my colleagues about it as well.”
Julian’s practiced smile broadened and he clinked his glass with hers. He went to take a sip of the wine and then stopped and gave Eliza a wink. “Well, I think this calls for champagne, don’t you?”
Eliza gave a laugh and watched him walk away. Fuck you, Senator Samuels. You don’t run the senate anymore. Still, she felt a little thrill of fear whenever she thought of the woman. If the briefs were correct, Maryam Samuels had been a truly terrifying woman.
Had been, Eliza told herself. She wasn’t around anymore—and it didn’t matter what she thought about the Advanced Terraforming Initiative.
Who knew what other planets might be out there? She was excited to see.
CHAPTER ONE
THE SHIP DOCKED at base at 0400 station time, but Jon Petcoff knew Ghost would be awake.
It was always awake.
He hadn’t always been a part of the organization, so he had never known her as Maryam Samuels. He’d been pulled in a few months back. We need a good pilot, one of his cousins had said casually, and Jon was a good pilot. He was a damned good pilot whose current company was going through a stringent round of budget cuts, everyone down to half-time and nothing better on the horizon.
Ghost’s organization hadn’t been all bad, either. You knew it wasn’t entirely on the level. There was too much that was just a little off. The ships all flew unregistered, for one thing. It operated on a planet Jon had never even heard of, and he’d been a good student. He’d memorized the flight paths and charts.
He was sure this place wasn’t on any of the standard maps.
Still, it was good money, it came in under the table, and they’d never asked him to do anything really shady. There weren’t armed guards on his ships or anything, or the sort of packages you just knew were drugs.
Jon had heard stories about the outright wars that went on between the cartels. They had armies to rival anything the navy could summon, and it was open season between them on each other’s ships.
As long as they killed each other, the Senate wasn’t going to spend much time caring about them. They had bigger issues to deal with, like slavers and…hell, who knew? The Senate didn’t give a damn about people like Jon. If he did a little bit of piloting for a grey market organization, it wasn’t like Intelligence was going to beat down his door and take him away.
Or so he thought. He was pretty sure that didn’t apply anymore. Things had gone pretty much to hell in the last two weeks, and he was finding himself stuck in what felt like a damned nightmare.
He looked over his shoulder, into the cabin of the tiny ship, and his heart twisted when he saw the little girl. She had been crying for most of the trip, and now she had exhausted herself and she was lying in a little heap, tearstained face blank with sleep, tiny body curled into a ball.
He had thought of taking her and running. Of course he had, what kind of monster wouldn’t? She had blood on her pajamas, clearly not hers, but she’d been gagged and crying when the guards brought her aboard, and there was no missing how well-armed they were, and how much she feared them.
They set her on the ground, gave Jon the coordinates to leave for, and then took their seats. They didn’t bother trying to comfort the girl.
Jon had drifted a little on his course, right away. He wanted
to see if they would notice, and they didn’t seem to. The thing was, he had no idea how to get both him and the girl off the ship without them killing him.
He’d done what he could, but eventually he brought the ship back on course and told himself that it didn’t help the girl at all if he got killed. Still, his gut was churning as the docking clamps attached to the ship and she jerked awake.
She looked around herself, her face crumpled, and she gave a wail.
One of the soldiers sighed, but otherwise, no one reacted at all. Jon looked around at them, and then unbuckled his harness and went to go kneel on the floor with her. He hesitated before wrapping his arms around her.
“It’s okay,” he said awkwardly, and as soon as he said it, he was sure he’d said the worst thing. It wasn’t okay. He had no idea what was about to happen to her.
Her wails only increased, and Jon found himself shaking. He wrapped his arms tighter around her and gathered her into his lap, then stood up awkwardly. She wound her arms around his neck, still crying.
The doors opened and the soldiers jerked their head toward the docking bay.
“At least let me carry her,” Jon said. His voice was tight.
He might as well have appealed to robots. They gave him completely blank looks before one of them ripped the girl out of his arms and carried her away. She screamed and reached for Jon.
He stood frozen. At this critical moment, his courage entirely failed him. The other soldiers were watching him, hands on their weapons, and he knew they wouldn’t hesitate to shoot him. He had the wild thought of whether it would be better for the little girl to see him get shot…or to think he hadn’t even cared enough to help her.
He couldn’t decide. In the end, it was just cowardice that kept him rooted to the spot.
There was a buzz in the earpieces the soldiers wore and several of them put a hand to their ear as they listened. Then one jerked his head at Jon.
“You’re to come with us.”
Jon could still hear the girl’s screams as he marched through the halls—first as an echoing wail, carried down the smooth corridors, and then in his head, never ceasing. Once, he looked back over his shoulder, only to have a soldier behind him shove him sharply in the back.
“Keep moving.”
Jon walked, wondering if he was going to throw up all over the soldier in front of him. He managed not to, but he was cold and clammy by the time he got to the elevator, and he barely held it together through the ride up through the station. He counted the dings to keep himself sane…until he realized where he was going.
He actually tried to run when the doors opened. There was nowhere to run, but he didn’t care. He didn’t want to see Ghost. He was too afraid to see Ghost.
The soldiers hauled him out anyway, and he threw up all over the floor as they dragged him. He wound up in a heap on the ground, and then he heard it: the strange mechanical click of joints as the thing stalked over to him. Its gait was still jerky. Not everything worked yet.
And not all the skin was in place yet, either. Jon looked up and gave a moan of fear as the half-skinned face peered at him. One electronic eye was seated uneasily in a metal socket, and the cheek was open. There was no tongue yet; the voice came from a speaker in the mouth.
“This is the pilot?” Ghost asked.
One of the soldiers nodded.
“Did you want to see the girl, too?” another one asked. He flinched slightly when the mechanical head turned, smoothly as an owl’s.
“Is she alive?” Ghost demanded.
“Yes.” The voice was a breath.
“Then, no. I do not need to see her.”
Jon, rolling his eyes to look at them, saw that most of them looked uncomfortable, too. No one in their right mind wouldn’t be afraid of Ghost, but then, these men had abducted a child without seeming to care at all. He was almost surprised to find out they were human.
“So you thought you would send messages, did you?” The voice was flat, and the cadence was just slightly off—as if Ghost still remembered being a human, but did not quite know how to speak any longer.
Jon froze.
He hadn’t thought anyone would know about the messages. He’d dropped the coordinates and the heading into little decoy buoys and jettisoned them during some of the more complex maneuvers so that the soldiers wouldn’t feel the ship shuddering.
He didn’t know who to contact, after all. It wasn’t like he could ask the child who her parents were, or where they’d found her. But he’d done what he could. Hopefully, someone would find the buoys and come to find the kid….
But as he looked around himself, he knew how useless a thought that was. This space station was a feat of engineering like nothing he’d ever seen. Some of the guys who worked in munitions had mentioned the station’s weaponry, and Jon knew that no one—no one—was getting onto this station, let alone off.
And he was going to die for that little bit of defiance.
“Answer me,” Ghost commanded.
Jon said nothing. He closed his eyes against the memory of the little girl, screaming as she was carried away from him. He couldn’t bear the thought, but it wouldn’t leave him alone. He made a noise he knew sounded like a wounded animal and curled his head into his chest.
There was a mechanical sort of sound and the soldiers stepped back instinctively. Jon saw that much.
But, mercifully, he died quickly enough not to see the rest.
Ghost stood up from amidst the blood on the floor. The soldiers were all looking away save one, who was staring very determinedly at what was left of the body. From the tic in his jaw, it was clearly taking everything he had.
“Have someone look for those buoys,” she said sharply to him. She watched only to see how quickly he obeyed. Would there be hesitation?
There was none. Good. She began to walk away.
“Ma’am?” His voice quavered slightly on the title. No one knew what to call her anymore.
Ghost stopped, but did not look back.
When he spoke again, he sounded like it was taking all of his courage. “Do you want—this—cleaned up?”
The mess. Ghost held up the hand that had skin on it and spent a moment admiring the way the light shone off the wet blood. She remembered enjoying the aesthetics of things. That was something she did not care as much about anymore.
“Yes,” she said finally. “Have it cleaned up.”
Even she found dismembered bodies to be unsightly.
CHAPTER TWO
“SO.” Talon settled himself into a chair at the heavy wooden table in the war room of the Ariane. “Tell me our game plan.”
His command crew and Nyx’s were here, as was Lesedi. Talon’s eyes, however, were fixed on the woman at the other end of the table.
Dess Tasper had been one of the few people John Hugo contacted when his daughter was abducted. As the Head of Alliance Intelligence, Hugo had almost unlimited resources at his disposal—but he was sure that he was being watched closely by Ghost. His choice to contact anyone at all had been risky, and Talon was intrigued by his choices.
Hugo, himself, was not here. He had been in limited contact with Lesedi, and knew that someone was working to get his daughter back—but everyone agreed that the less details he knew, the better.
Lesedi, Talon knew and trusted. Dess Tasper was another matter. She was quiet and professional, with understated clothing and brown hair drawn neatly back into a bun. She moved well enough that she had been trained in something. Talon would guess it was dance, but she was self-contained enough that it could easily be some form of combat.
Everything about her was unobtrusive at first glance, and yet, the more you looked, the more you saw—and the more you wanted to see. Once the first shreds of the illusion fell apart, she became endlessly interesting.
Which was part of why Tersi was staring at her, no doubt, but definitely not all of it. The man looked like a teenager with a first crush. Talon tried to hide his smile. And was it his
imagination, or did Dess’s eyes stray to Tersi before she answered?
“The key to a hostage negotiation is disruption.” Her voice was low and pleasant. She looked around at all of them, meeting Talon’s eyes and Nyx’s, nodding slightly to Lesedi, and letting her eyes skim over Centurion, Wraith, and Aegis. Tersi, her eyes skipped over. She cleared her throat. “In theory, the hostage-taker has created a story in their head. There’s something they need, and they cannot get it by a…traditional…vector. Therefore, they create leverage by taking a living person into custody, and create a bargain: whatever the thing is they need, in return for their hostage’s safety.”
Talon settled back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest. He was frowning.
“There are two main conflict points in this bargain,” Dess explained. “First, we have the issue that there will be consequences of some sort for the hostage situation. They’re already sacrificing something. In most cases, they’re putting the very thing they want at risk—they want safety, immunity, some form of power, but this sort of crime means that they won’t get what they want. The second conflict point is that the violence of their actions leads their opponents to believe that the bargain will not be upheld. This is….” She considered. “A somewhat reasonable fear.”