by Natalie Grey
Dess knew he was making a joke, trying to help her feel at ease, but she still couldn’t make herself look up at him.
“You okay?” he asked. “Look, I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“No, it’s fine.” Dess pasted her work smile on her face and looked up at him. “I just have a lot of work to do.”
It took considerable self-control to walk to the door of the bunk instead of running, and she closed it behind herself rather than slamming it. She was fighting the urge to turn around and tell him she was sorry, that she didn’t mean to be rude—
She couldn’t say any of that.
She leaned back against the door and stared up at the ceiling with her vision blurring. Then she sank her face into her hands, wiped the tears away, and went to the desk. Her jaw set as she pulled out her work.
She was going to find a way to fix this.
A way to get out of this without them killing Ghost.
Out in the hallway, Tersi stared at the closed door and found himself going over the things he had said. They hadn’t been the smoothest things that had ever come out of his mouth. He was smart enough to realize that.
But had they really been so bad?
He walked to the door and raised his hand to knock, then dropped it back to his side. He clenched it in a fist, released it, and tried not to think of the way Dess smiled when she wasn’t paying attention. She was so controlled, but there were strong currents beneath the surface. In every way, she seemed different from—
He froze, and to his shame, his chin trembled. He saw the flash of a smile and light glinting off golden hair.
He backed away from the door. He wasn’t ready for this. He didn’t want to see Dess smile and have his stomach flip over.
He walked away, refusing to look back over his shoulder.
He wasn’t ready.
In the room, Dess looked towards the door. She was sure she’d heard footsteps, but then they went away again.
Had it been Tersi?
She shouldn’t have snapped at him. Maybe she should explain what was going on—why this negotiation terrified her to her very core. She should explain it to all of them, really. She was sure they weren’t as terrifying as they’d seemed in that meeting, all together.
But by the time she found to the courage to open the door, whoever it had been was long gone.
CHAPTER FOUR
IN THE OFFICES of an unnamed station, Ghost stood motionless as she stared out one of the large, paneled windows. In the foreground, there was a constant hum of activity: ships coming and going with supplies and manufactured goods; patrols; test flights of her fleet. Behind all of that, there was only blackness.
She could have put the station in orbit above Eternas, of course. In some ways, things would have been much easier. With almost unlimited arable land, rich ore deposits, and well-developed industry, Eternas was as close to a clone of Old Earth as it was possible to be. Her station would not need to house its own production facilities.
It wasn’t safe, however. They had secured Eternas when humanity first reached these systems, and since then, a long line of family heads had done everything in their power to make sure the planet was never discovered. Since Ghost had taken over as the head of the family a few years before, she had taken every precaution to make sure that no one would ever find them.
The tactics used over the generations ranged from sensible, to devious, to outright insane. There was the standard set of bribes, followed over the next few years by quiet assassinations. Different members of the family had served the cause by joining records departments and surveying companies to change everyone’s maps. As far as anyone knew, Eterass was an unfortunate hunk of rock with no ore deposits and extreme temperature fluctuations due to an unstable star.
When a young Maryam Samuels had made it her goal to join the Alliance Senate, she had been called before her family elders so that they could yell at her for risking the family. The level of scrutiny senators faced was extreme. What if they were found out?
She promised they would not be. When they doubted her, she showed them the layers of security she already had in place. She reminded them how much good she could do for the family if only she were allowed to do this.
Mostly, she longed to be free. Many of the family preferred to stay on their own, insular little planet. They lived in luxury there. If they wanted to do nothing with their lives, they could easy do so—there were enough others who ran the factories and the farms. If a scion of the family wanted to dabble in management, they could. If they wanted to have a coterie of slaves and put on gladiatorial shows, they could do that. Many availed themselves of such luxuries; after all, things like that were banned in the Alliance, weren’t they?
To Maryam, however, staying there felt like stagnation. There was no challenge, no growth. She craved nothing more than to try herself against the Alliance—bend it to her will without it even realizing. She got a secret thrill from walking through the corridors of the senate building, knowing that there was an entire world these people knew nothing about, and it gave her a place to run if ever things went wrong. She could always disappear.
In time, though, the senatorial career hadn’t been enough for her. She’d inserted herself, slowly but surely, into her family’s smuggling business, doing things no one else could do. The smuggling of Gerren’s Ore had been her idea, and she had generated truly impressive revenues for her family, as well as subtly tweaking laws to give her family’s companies an edge in any number of areas. When she returned from her first senate term, it was in triumph. She challenged her uncle for control of the family.
Or, rather, she killed him in front of the rest of the family council and took his place. No one objected; after all, he had secured his place in the same way. If he wasn’t willing to take the most basic precautions, he could hardly be expected to lead them.
For years, Maryam had led them without a single moment of indecision. She did not respect people who mired themselves in regret. She made the best decisions she could, and moved on to the next decision.
Now, however….
Now, when she went back, she saw how they looked at her. The artificial body was causing some issues with the uploaded consciousness. She was constantly being tweaked and upgraded. Even when all of her skin was in place, she knew she did not move the same way she had when she was still nominally human.
“Human,” of course, was an arbitrary term she had little use for. The Alliance allowed all sorts of upgrades and enhancements, from genomic and medical tweaks to artificial organs. What put someone over the line from “enhanced human” to “cyborg” was entirely subjective.
Nor, in Ghost’s opinion, was there any use to being human. She had never feared the singularity, but instead, welcomed it.
It seemed her family did not feel the same. Now, though she was in all ways superior to what she had once been, they somehow did not think she was worthy to lead them. When she addressed them, she saw the revulsion in their eyes. She saw the way they looked at one another, as if she would not notice—should we do away with her?
She must find a way to demonstrate what she was: an eternal head of the family, not hampered by human vices or mortality. There could be no one better than her. It was simply a fact.
But what sort of demonstration…?
She began to pace around the room. She did not need to sit at her desk in order to take in information; it ran through her head in a stream, a waterfall of data always being entered and organized. She did not need a bedroom to sleep in, either. She was beginning to realize how much time had been taken up before by human frailty.
She smiled—a habit she did not need, but one she liked.
All of this left her with more time. More time to identify her enemies now….
And destroy them before they could ever become a true threat.
CHAPTER FIVE
“ALL RIGHT.” Nyx hopped up on one of the filing cabinets that ran along one side of the Conway’s
war room and tucked a knee up under her chin.
She’d always been uncomfortable standing still, and her old crew on the Ariane had learned to expect her to pace, sprawl sideways in her chair, and usually wind up sitting on some other piece of furniture by the end of any long meeting.
She was now getting comfortable enough to show this particular quirk to the crew of Team 11 as well.
Wraith, at least, seemed to find it amusing. “Chairs aren’t good enough for you, Captain?”
Nyx flashed her a smile and shifted to sit cross-legged.
“She’s sort of like a cat,” Choop said.
Nyx reached out and began to slide his mug of tea off the edge of the filing cabinets.
“Hey!” He rescued it. “Don’t mess with a soldier’s caffeine, cap, are you crazy?”
Nyx laughed. “All right,” she said again. She folded her hands together and pointed at the table with both index fingers. A map was projected there. “Planning time. Foxtail came up trump on this, so everyone give her a round of applause when you see her. This is the headquarters of a tiny and heretofore insignificant staffing company called Integrative Staffing Solutions. They have lovely advertising brochures about their accountants, cleaning people, guards, and pilots. All very boring. Except….”
She held up a little remote and pressed a button. The map disappeared, replaced with a grainy image of a man holding a child, next to another image of a standard hovercar.
“This is the car that Rhea Hugo was loaded into after her abduction. It shows up on surveillance footage all the way to the private spaceport at the edge of the city.”
“That seems like quite a lapse on Ghost’s part,” Wraith commented.
“Not something she intended us to find,” Nyx clarified. “The car, itself, has some blocking signals that caused wipes in several surveillance systems. However, tracing which systems experienced that issue, in addition to getting video from several closed-circuit systems, allowed us to piece together their route.”
“How’d we get into closed-circuit systems?” Loki asked, frowning. “Aren’t they, you know … closed?” He flushed as soon as he asked it, as if worried that this was a stupid question.
“We still have Tera on Seneca,” Nyx explained. To the rest of the crew, not all of whom knew exactly who Tera was, she said only, “Tera has some contacts and favors on Seneca, and this is a big enough deal for her to call them in.”
It was more likely, of course, that Tera had simply snuck into each building on her own, but they didn’t need to know that—just like they didn’t need to know Tera’s parentage.
Dragon teams were famously loyal, and Team 11 would trust Nyx if she said Tera was an ally. Still, the fact that Tera’s father was the man who’d had their last captain murdered, was something Nyx didn’t want to share just yet.
She returned to her presentation. “In order to get into the spaceport, the car had to present a certificate, which traced back to Integrative Staffing Solutions. Now, it’s not out of the question that they would have the correct security to get into the spaceport—after all, they do theoretically have pilots on staff. However, the more we look at these people, the more unusual they appear.”
She clicked the remote, and a new set of images were projected: a list of contracts, and some of Integrative Staffing Solution’s marketing materials. People in uniforms flashed dead-eyed smiles at the camera while too-happy executives shook hands enthusiastically with one another. The brochures used a full suite of buzzwords, from “top quality” to “efficiency.”
The team read the information presented and Nyx waited.
Maple understood the information first. She whistled softly. “They’ve been in an awful lot of buildings that house government offices.”
“Bingo.” Nyx pointed at her. “They’ve been running this company for years, and most of their business is probably legitimate, in fact. They have temps doing all sorts of shit, all boring. And then, every once in a while—well, I’m guessing as often as they can manage it—they have these jobs. Now, I don’t know for certain that they’ve put bugs in government systems, but between the jobs we’re seeing here, the level of security clearance they’ve been granted at the spaceports, and the fact that one of their cars was used for the Hugo abduction, I’d say we have a pretty good case for them being involved.”
“Wait,” Doc said slowly. “Integrative Staffing Solutions.” She folded her arms in front of her chest and considered. “That sounds familiar for some reason.”
Nyx rested her hands palms-down on the cabinet and waited. Doc had a more unorthodox history than many Dragons, and if she remembered this organization, Team 11 might have more of an in than they presently did.
Doc rubbed at her hair. “God, it was—I can’t remember. It was off-hand comment someone made, and I really couldn’t tell you what the gist was. I just remember someone mentioning them. ‘Oh, they’re one of X’s organizations.’ X is just a placeholder, I think it was someone’s name and they thought I’d know who it was.” She shook her head in frustration.
“Did you ever join one of the, uh….” Choop leaned on the filing cabinet and flashed her his careless smile. “Syndicates?”
“No.” Doc shook her head and gave a mock-worried look that made a few members of the team chuckle. “Once you’re in, you’re in. I wasn’t prepared to do that. Knew a bunch of their people. They were trying to recruit me for a while. Can’t remember how I talked my way out of that one without getting on somebody’s shit list.”
“As far as you know,” Halo told her jokingly. With bristly blonde hair and delicate features, he always looked like a mashup of two different people to Nyx: a bodybuilder on the one hand, and a model on the other. He was every inch a Dragon, though, causing nearly as much chaos in combat as Loki did.
“Oh, I made real sure not to know anything about anybody,” Doc said. “Normally I research everything, but once they started talking to me? I didn’t know a damned thing. Forgot everyone’s names, went out of my way not to get properly introduced, never put a single search on my computer, never so much as asked my friends for anyone’s backstory, always found a way to leave if people started talking details about anything.” She grimaced in frustration. “Goddamn, I wish I could remember what it was someone had said about these people.”
“If you remember….” Nyx began.
“I’ll tell you,” Doc assured her. She swept her black braid back over a shoulder and gave Nyx a smile and a nod.
“Excellent.” Nyx looked around at the rest. “Well, as luck would have it, we’re about two hours away from Integrative Staffing Solution’s main headquarters.”
“Luck and … those coordinates you gave me?” Halo asked.
“Yes, that.” Nyx grinned, pleased with herself. “Now, to be honest with all of you, I haven’t got the faintest idea—”
“Captain?” It was Foxtail’s voice, filtering over the comms from the bridge. “We have a weird signal coming up on a comm buoy.”
Nyx frowned. “Uh … can you be more specific?”
“It’s flashing a set of coordinates that line up with—God, fucking nothing on any of my maps, and the signifier for a small passenger transport. Not as in, that’s part of the coding—as in, they put that code after the coordinates. It’s all showing up as a distress beacon.”
Nyx tilted her head to the side. “Rhea Hugo is four years old,” she said, after a pause. “She can’t possibly have had anything to do with this, right?”
“No,” Doc said, “but it’s possible someone on the team who took her got cold feet.” When everyone looked at her, she shrugged. “Most of what the mob does is really, really boring. It’d be easy for someone to sign on and not have to do anything like this for years. And then, all of a sudden, bam—child abduction.”
“Yeah, but this isn’t the mob,” Maple pointed out.
“It’s a criminal organization, and my guess is that Ghost was smart enough not to pin everything on the Gerren’s Or
e. There are probably quite a few industries she’s involved with.”
Nyx chewed her lip. “Foxtail?”
“Yeah?”
“Can you send that information to Lesedi, please?”
“Will do. Any particular protocols for data security?”
“She handles all that on her end.”
“All right.”
Foxtail signed off and Nyx hopped down from the cabinets. She sighed as she brought up the layout of the base.
“Well, that aside, here’s our play: I want all of you kitted out and in the shuttle bay for a drop. I’m taking Loki and Centurion with me to the surface to chat with whoever’s in charge. If we find Rhea Hugo, you’ll all be coming in as well—Wraith, you and Foxtail will be scanning to see what you can find. I’m leaving you in charge of getting that operation underway if it needs to happen. Don’t check in, just do it.”
Wraith nodded.
“I honestly have no idea if these people know what they’re involved in,” Nyx said, “or if they can give me anything about where that shuttle went. If they have tracking software in their shuttles or their pilots, we might have a shot at finding where they took Rhea Hugo.”
“Assuming it’s not here,” Centurion said.
“Assuming it’s not here,” Nyx agreed. “But everyone get a meal and get ready to go. We need to be on our game for this one. This is a part of Ghost’s organization, however tangentially. There are going to be complications.”
CHAPTER SIX
AEGIS PASSED a last form to Talon and Talon signed it with a flourish.
“Finally.” He gave an unfriendly look at the pile of forms on the desk. “That’s one of the worst sets I can remember. What did I even sign?” He lifted an eyebrow at Aegis. “I don’t really care, mind you, but in the spirit of pretending….”