by Natalie Grey
Aegis gave him a look of disapproval.
“I was paying some attention,” Talon assured him. “There were supply requisition requests for food. There was one for ammunition. Actually, there were a lot for ammunition.” He frowned.
“We’re asking for a new set of missiles and countermeasures.” Aegis still did not look impressed with Talon’s carefree attitude. “You saw the newest specs—”
“Ah. I remember now.” He did remember. He had told Aegis that they absolutely had to have the new set, and Aegis had heaved a sigh and said he would put in the paperwork. “We have to sign a lot of forms for that, then?”
“No, it’s easy to get a whole set of missiles.” Aegis gave him a Look.
Talon cleared his throat. “Er, well, thank you. Can I offer you a drink?” Hopefully that would make amends.
“We have one more thing to go over.”
Talon paused, halfway out of his chair. He wasn’t sure he liked that tone. “Oh?” he said finally.
“We’re short a third of a crew,” Aegis said bluntly.
“Oh.” Talon said back down and heaved a sigh. “Right. That.”
Aegis was looking more sympathetic now. “It isn’t easy to replace the fallen.”
Talon rubbed at his head. His XO was right. It seemed disloyal, somehow, to replace Sphinx and Meph. Walking past their old bunks always gave him a stab of pain, but he welcomed it now. They had been a part of his team.
They couldn’t be replaced.
And while he would gladly spit on Mars’ and Camorra’s graves, their empty bunks, too, were a reminder—that he’d misjudged terribly and almost wound up dead, and his crew with him.
Not to mention the fact that he was still holding out some ridiculous hope that Loki and Nyx would come back. He knew they wouldn’t. It wouldn’t even be right for them to do so. He hoped for it anyway.
But he had to do this. He couldn’t keep expecting the rest of his team to fight with five less members than they should.
“Where the hell are we gonna find five?” he asked wearily.
“Selection didn’t take everyone.” Aegis took a sip of his now-cold tea. “So there’s bound to be at least one there that you can make do with, if nothing else.”
“I do not,” Talon said with feeling, “‘make do’ when it comes to my team.”
“One who’s almost good enough is better than five empty spots in the roster, and you know it. Besides which—” Aegis shrugged “—you’ve never taken everyone else’s top picks. ‘Cept maybe with Loki. I know I wasn’t anyone’s first choice, my year—’til you came to see.”
“Their loss.” Talon’s voice was emphatic. He knew that other team leaders had seen the grey in Aegis’s hair, noted the slightly slower reflexes of an older fighter, and decided that it was too much of a risk. Talon, however, had watched the way Aegis planned a fight, the way he hung on after the other fighters had gone to get a drink of water or catch their breath, and the way he hit like a freight train.
Talon had never once had cause to regret his choice.
“You see what I mean, though.” Aegis gave a good-natured shrug, though Talon thought he was pleased.
“Yeah. I’ll ask Hugo who’s still there.” Talon frowned. “Or maybe not Hugo.”
“He’d probably welcome the distraction,” Aegis pointed out. “You can always put out a call to see who might be looking for a trade, too.”
“I’m not giving up any of the people I have.” Talon snorted. “Besides, all of us are down a few now. Thank you, Aleksandr Soras.” He sighed. “Worth a shot, anyway. Most people aren’t down five, maybe some people are looking for a change of scenery….” He waved his hand to indicate other possibilities he couldn’t think of just now.
“Exactly,” Aegis said. “And I will take that drink.”
“Now you’re talking.” Talon gave him a grin and went to the closet, where he kept his whiskey beside his dress shoes.
“So, how’s Tera?” Aegis asked while Talon set the bottle down and went for glasses.
“Haven’t been in contact since we left Seneca,” Talon called from the bathroom. The glasses were drying on the edge of the sink and he gave them both another polish with a towel before bringing them out. “The Io’s dark right now unless there’s anything especially pressing. Hard to know what Ghost knows and what she doesn’t, and with them being Hugo’s link….”
“Ah.” Aegis gave a nod.
“But she’s settling in well,” Talon said. “Better than she would have here, as much as I hate to say it.”
“She’s not a Dragon,” Aegis told him, “any more than Cade was, really. It’s too bad.”
“True,” Talon agreed. He slid Aegis’s glass toward him, clinked his own against the rim, and took a sip. “But it is what it is. Sounds like they’re all gelling well together, though. Given their rather … unique … backgrounds, it could definitely be going worse.”
Aegis was laughing when the door slid open to admit Tersi.
Talon looked up with a smile. “How’s it going?”
“Hey.” Tersi looked as though he hadn’t slept in a week. His reddish-brown hair was messy, and his usual 5 o’clock shadow had turned into a couple days’ worth of stubble. Nyx had kept a lot of her Navy habits when she came to the Dragons. Tersi had gone the other way, reveling in the lack of specific ship uniforms and other strict codes on grooming and behavior.
He came into the room at Talon’s nod and slid a chip into the computer on the desk, bringing up some data on the screen. “I have a lock on one of Ghost’s old waypoints.”
Both Aegis and Talon sat up straighter, pushing their glasses away as they frowned at the screen. The system coordinates fell well within the boundaries of Alliance space, and yet….
“Where is that?” Aegis asked.
“It’s gotta be over somewhere near Osiris,” Talon said. His brow was furrowed and his hands moved, trying to conceptualize the 3D map in his head.
Tersi nodded at him. “Lenticula isn’t well-known on its own, but once you start looking it up, you see that a good amount of traffic is going through there. There’s a bunch in the way of water, fairly poor ores, et cetera. The sort of system you’d use if you had convertible engines, yeah? But not quite good enough for a mining outpost.”
“Smuggling,” Aegis guessed.
“Yep. More grey market, really. I’m sure customs knows about it, but they’re not going to touch most of the stuff going on near Osiris if they can help it.”
Talon grinned. People already gave him a side-eye for doing business on Akintola Station and New Arizona, but neither of those places held a candle to Osiris. Tera’s birthplace was known for its slums and its exports: drugs, people, and weapons. Tersi was right, customs agents weren’t going to try to enforce any sort of reporting—they’d get blown out of the sky, and that would be if they were lucky.
“And Ghost set up her own base there?” Talon asked.
“Not exactly.” Tersi brought up rough blueprints of a standard mining rig station. “I’m guessing they rent space here. It almost certainly doesn’t look like this anymore, but I can’t find any more information on what it’s like now. I suppose I don’t even know if anyone runs it or if people just staked out claims to various bits.”
“So we go,” Talon said, “and … what?”
“Maybe it’s not even a good idea to go,” Tersi said, with a shrug. “But since I found it, I thought I’d show you. There might be something useful there, I guess. It’s a waypoint for some of her communications—I don’t know what else might be around there. I checked, I mean, but I didn’t see anything, and I mean anything.”
“There’s nothing around there,” Aegis said suddenly. “I remember, because one of my friends had this grand theory about the distribution of habitable planets and he was sure there should be one there. There’s a system with a rocky planet, all right, but it’s apparently a total hellhole.”
“Disappointing,” Talon commente
d.
“Not to him. He got this idea that all the charts were wrong and went haring off in his own ship to look at it. He was going to terraform it himself, or something.” Aegies rolled his eyes.
“What happened to him?” Even Tersi, exhausted and quiet, was intrigued now.
“Haven’t the faintest. Never heard from him again. He probably had his ship break down in the middle of nowhere and got himself dead.” Aegis tried to carry off the pronouncement in his usual gruff tone, but Talon could hear the sadness there. There was a pause, and then Aegis added, “Damned waste. We were just kids.”
Talon gave him a sympathetic smile. “There’s a lot out that way. Odds are, he stopped somewhere to resupply and wound up working on a cargo hauler when he realized how insane his plan was.”
Aegis gave him a grateful look.
“And you know who we should ask,” Talon told Tersi. “Our guest. I’m sure she has a better idea than we do of what she can work with.”
Tersi had gone very still, but he gave a businesslike nod. “I’ll let you talk to her?”
“Come with me,” Talon said blandly. “You’ll know the details better than I do.” He saw Tersi consider whether or not to beg off, and he resisted exchanging a smile with Aegis.
He wasn’t cruel. He knew that Tersi was struggling. They all were. They missed Sphinx, and Tersi missed her more than most. This wouldn’t be easy for him. But he’d also spent a good few months now locked inside his own head, quietly grieving, and this was the first time since that battle that Talon had seen him really take an interest in anything. Everything else was a coping mechanism, a dogged attempt to forget the woman he’d loved.
When he looked at Dess, he actually smiled.
“I’ll be back in a bit,” Talon told Aegis, and he ushered Tersi out of his cabin.
They didn’t talk much on the walk to the spare bunk. Tersi seemed to be steeling himself, as if for a confrontation, and Talon fought the urge to whistle a cheery tune. It was hard not to—he was done with paperwork for the day, and he was about to see Tersi acting like a lovesick kid after months of grieving.
Talon knocked on the door himself and felt his lips twitch when Dess opened the door and her face immediately fell.
Looking for someone else? He didn’t say that, of course. He wouldn’t tease her the way he would with one of his crew. Instead, he shifted slightly so she could see Tersi, and noted the way the color came to her cheeks.
Interesting. Very interesting.
“We’ve found a possible waypoint used by Ghost’s organization,” Talon told her. “It’s in the Lenticula system.”
She looked back at him as though she’d completely forgotten he was there. She probably had, in fact. “Right,” she said. “The station. She doesn’t own it.” Something seemed to occur to her, then, and her mouth opened—only for her to close it again and give a practiced smile.
“You…know about it?” Talon asked slowly.
There was a pause. “I did my research,” she told finally. She looked between the two of them. “Do you have any additional information?”
Tersi held out the chip. “Here’s what I found. It includes the messages that went through there.” He waited for her to put out her hand and dropped the chip, rather than set it in her palm.
Talon fought the urge to bang his head against the side of the doorframe. “Should we set a course?” he asked Dess.
“I doubt it.” She looked at the chip, then at Tersi. Bitterly, she added, “I don’t think she’ll be there for you to take her out.”
Before Talon could respond, she went into the room and closed the door behind her, somewhat harder than necessary. He pulled his arm away before it got shut in the door and looked at Tersi in confusion.
Tersi hunched his shoulders. “My fault,” he said, by way of explanation. “I told her we’d probably be dealing with Ghost. I mean, ‘we’ as in, the Dragons.”
“She objected?” Talon let him away from the room, speaking in a low voice that shouldn’t carry back to her.
“More than somewhat,” Tersi said drily. He gave Talon a smile, unexpectedly finding humor in it. “I don’t think she likes soldier types much.”
“Hmm,” Talon said noncommittally. He’d lay odds that Dess would have changed her tune before too long. “Well, go take a shower and get some sleep. You look like you could use it.”
Tersi gave a weary mock-salute and jogged off, and Talon watched him go before looking back at Dess’s door speculatively. Now he had a new objective: make Dess more comfortable with Dragons.
It was a pity Loki wasn’t here. He had a disarming sort of charm to him.
“Jester, maybe…?” Talon murmured to himself. He headed back to his cabin, considering.
He didn’t intend to let either of them off the ship without at least a fling.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“YOU’RE sure this is going to work,” Nyx said skeptically as she tucked a small red patch on the inside of her vambrace.
A Dragon always wore red, whether the mission demanded discretion or not.
“Pretty sure,” Foxtail said. She lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “There shouldn’t be any way of determining that this is a Dragon ship if you don’t already know it is one. If they already know who we are, though….”
Nyx tried not to sigh. Foxtail really had gone above and beyond on this mission, changing the Conway’s call codes and auto-signaling so that it presented itself as one of the hired mercenary ships that escorted big cargo convoys. It wasn’t her fault that someone might already have run into the ship before, and know that it held Dragons, instead.
“They let us land, right?” Loki asked.
“Yes,” Nyx agreed.
“You mean, ‘yes, but,’ don’t you?”
“Pretty much.”
Nyx mostly just had a bad feeling about all of this. Anything related to Ghost tended to go sideways at the slightest provocation. After years of being one step ahead of her opponents, she usually found herself two or more steps behind Ghost, and she didn’t like it.
Her biggest fear was that they would tip their hand by showing up here, but they needed to get this information—some information, any information. They needed to find Hugo’s daughter before Ghost found a way to eat away at the Alliance from the inside.
And she consoled herself with the fact that Ghost might care a hell of a lot more about making Nyx suffer, than killing the kid. She could probably find a way to turn that to her advantage.
“Well, I guess we’ll see.” She gave a nod to tell Foxtail she was dismissed. “Oh, wait—any word from Lesedi?”
“None yet.” Foxtail grimaced. “I don’t even know if she got the message.”
“Hmm.” Nyx didn’t like quite this much uncertainty, but it was out of their control and she needed to focus on the rest of the mission now. “Okay. Thanks.”
Foxtail nodded and disappeared, and Nyx considered the rest of the mission. Everything about this, from the lack of a ransom note to the eerie silence between Ghost and Nyx, seemed just a little off. On the other hand….
“I killed you once, you bitch,” she muttered. “I can kill you again.”
She looked up and saw Centurion’s mouth twitching at this pronouncement. He and Loki were waiting with her by the blast doors that led to the main airlock, while the rest of the Dragons filed past on their way to the armory to get kitted out. Wraith clapped Nyx on the shoulder as she went past and Nyx gave her a nod. The two of them had gone over the layout of the base, as far as they could determine what that was, and had managed to isolate a few good strategies for getting inside.
For the first time, Nyx understood what it meant to rely on an XO. It had taken her a while to get the hang of it, mostly because she’d spent the last few years in that role. She was used to being the person Talon went to for backup, so she naturally tried to do both the captain’s job, and the XO’s. She still had to remind herself to account for Wraith when planning, but the woman
made it easy with her pragmatism and competence. Though it was Centurion, older and gruffer, who outwardly resembled Aegis, it was Wraith who reminded Nyx of her old teammate.
Wraith would be keeping tabs on the situation via the comms, and—absent any specific instructions—would choose how and where to supply backup if it were needed. Nyx, to her surprise, found that she was comfortable with this. She had seen Wraith’s judgement and competence in battle.
Nyx was finally settling in.
With a small smile, she pressed the button to open the blast doors and ushered Loki and Centurion inside before following them in. They stood still for decontamination and Nyx gave herself a last few seconds to relax.
Their break before this latest mission had been welcome. She’d missed Mala with a fierceness that surprised her. She’d dated before, of course, but she’d always been more or less content to go weeks without seeing whoever her present girlfriend was.
She hadn’t really expected any of those to pan out, of course. Being in the Navy wasn’t great for relationships, and being in the Dragons was worse. They’d joke about it, though, all of them grinning as they worked out or cleaned the ship: have to be gone to miss ‘em.
She didn’t enjoy being apart from Mala, though. As much as her life seemed complete day to day, she felt the pull to wake up together, share the small moments of a day.
She’d retire someday, she told herself. It would just be a long few years in that particular respect. With a wry smile and one last adjustment of her greaves, she stepped out into the half-obscured sunshine of the gigantic moon called Reis.
In any other system, Reis would be a fairly respectably sized planet. In this one, it had been locked into orbit around a truly enormous gas giant that blocked out a significant portion of the sky. Nyx wondered if she could feel a faint pull towards the planet above.
At least she was able to walk mostly normally. Bounding across smaller moons could be fun, but added a chaotic factor to combat.