by Natalie Grey
“Someone went out of their way to hide it,” Lesedi said, with a shrug. “I stumbled across it after looking at the coordinates you gave me from that message, Nyx—still checking on whether the message itself is connected to all of this, but between those coordinates and the data from the company’s computers….” She trailed off, lost in concentration as she brought up more screens full of data.
She was standing in an apartment that must be John Hugo’s. Talon could see a landscape painting behind her, and Hugo’s pale face in the background. He was eating, while Cade stood over him—presumably to ensure that he cleaned his plate. Talon’s lips twitched. Cade took great pride in his cooking, and might well be pulling out all the stops in terms of guilting Hugo into eating: I spent two hours on that lasagna and you can’t finish it?
“Actually,” Lesedi continued, “It was probably several someones who hid it. At fairly regular intervals, updates have been made to the planet descriptions to make sure that no new technologies would make it an attractive target for mining. They were quite careful about it all.”
“Still.” Talon chewed on his thumbnail as he leaned back in his chair.
At his side, Tersi was frowning. I’ll be back in a moment, he mouthed, and he left the war room.
Talon stared after him for a moment, and decided it was probably too much to hope for that Tersi was going to have a quick tryst with Dess. Ah, well. “That’s a lot of access into official databases, though,” he said to the others. “And those entries come from all over the place. They went to the trouble of getting people into all of those different jobs just to….” His voice trailed off.
“Exactly,” Tera said. She leaned to get her head in the frame and gave Talon a smile that made his heart do a little sideways leap. She moved her fingers in a tiny wave to him, but her mind was clearly still racing ahead on the information they’d been given. “When you’re hiding a planet, it’s worth quite a bit of trouble to keep it hidden. Imagine owning a whole planet—and not Ymir, either, but a planet with cities and rents and taxes.”
“You said cities,” Nyx broke in. “Do we have any recent satellite images, then?”
“Just a guess,” Tera clarified. “Running a planet the way my father did is actually a pretty inefficient way to go about things. It’s much easier if people are happy. Then they don’t try to do things like, you know … escape.”
“People always have wanderlust,” Lesedi objected. “If they’re actually keeping tabs on this planet, and they’ve managed to keep it hidden, I imagine you’ll notice some fairly large differences in infrastructure. You’d see things closer to Old Earth in that respect. Very few spaceports.”
Talon nodded. On the screen, spinning slowly, was an orb to represent Eternas—apparently, the seat of Ghost’s operations. This brought to mind more questions, however. He let his chair thump down and leaned on the hardwood table in his war room. He was drumming his fingers on the wood as he squinted. If it was a whole planet….
“The smuggling operation, even at its height, must have been only the smallest part of what they did.”
Lesedi looked over at him with a small smile. “Yes,” she said softly. “Well, not so small. The market for Gerren’s Ore is lucrative enough that even skimming off the top, she still took enough to match the GDP of a good-sized planet. She massively increased their fortunes while everything was going well. But you’re right—there’s a lot more here than we thought.”
“And she’s not the first one to be running it,” Nyx said. “Not by a long shot.” She rubbed at her forehead. “Doc might be able to guess more about this. She has some experience with…organizations like Ghost’s.”
“You have a mobster on your ship?” Talon said, in mock horror.
“Stitching us up after missions, no less.” Nyx was grinning. “Don’t worry, we’re all very careful not to piss her off.”
Tera laughed. The sound was natural, and yet there was still a certain reserve to it. She had not often had cause to laugh until recently, and she still seemed surprised every time someone said something funny.
“The Samuels family is very rich.” It was the first time John Hugo had spoken, and everyone quieted at once to look at him. He looked back, seeming somewhat lost, and for a moment, Talon saw the fear threaten to swamp him. But he set his chin and took a deep breath before taking refuge in facts. He looked at Lesedi. “I assume anything we do here is presently outside her surveillance?”
Lesedi nodded and everyone watched as Hugo got up and went to a panel in the corner. He sorted through files for a few moments before bringing up lists of assets.
Nyx gave a whistle and Talon, who had tipped back in his chair again, nearly went right over backwards.
“Holy shit.” Too late, he remembered that he was talking to the Head of Intelligence, who might not be used to language like that in meetings.
Hugo seemed more amused than anything, however. This was likely the sort of distraction he desperately needed. “Indeed,” was all he said.
The Samuels family didn’t just own a secret planet. They owned any number of legitimate properties and businesses as well, from restaurants and hotels, to businesses like the one Nyx had gone after, and their annual combined income was enough to make Talon’s eyes glaze over.
He gave Nyx a look. “Did your captive mention this?”
“Not even a little.” She was shaking her head. “I’ll bet you almost none of them know who they’re really working for, though.”
“Quite likely,” Hugo said. “It’s difficult to keep even a single family in line, let alone the boards of several businesses—and there are strict rules on what a member of government can own. It’s an open secret, of course, that many of them have portfolios like this, but the Samuels are in a class of their own. Of course…” He gave a small shrug. “She’s the first to have sought elected office, as far as I can tell.”
“Is that important?” The question was genuine. As far as Talon was concerned, most families only turned out one politician, if any.
“When you’re trying to hide a planet, yes, it is noteworthy.” Hugo gave him a small smile. “Because people do things like research your holdings. Now, Intelligence found all of this here and passed that information to the Senate. More really should have been made of it, especially given that she was part of the anti-corruption push, but my guess is that all of it was owned by people just distant enough from her that she could say none of it was her own. Second cousins, great-aunts and -uncles, that sort of thing.”
Talon groaned. He hated when the law was used as a shelter for bad deeds. It was part of why he’d become a Dragon, not an officer in the Navy, and Nyx had been open about the fact that it was a large part of why she’d switched over.
The door opened behind him and Tersi came in with Aegis. The older man had been sparring, which Talon had opted not to pull him away from, but Tersi murmured something in his ear and pointed at the screen.
Everyone had paused, hearing the door open, and so they were all watching when Aegis muttered, “Son of a bitch.” He nodded at Tersi, and then at Talon. “That’s it, that’s the planet my friend swore should be habitable.”
“You’re kidding.” Talon was smiling. “Well, he was right.”
A moment later, though, he had the sobering thought that Aegis’s friend had probably been shot down, if not executed—after a nice round of torture to make sure no one else knew where he’d gone.
Aegis didn’t seem to have put two and two together yet, which was good. Nyx gave him a wave and he nodded back at her, smiling.
“So there’s a whole planet,” Talon explained. “Ghost’s family apparently owns … a large chunk of the Alliance, it looks like.”
“Ah.” Aegis gave a nod. “Just a matter of time until they spit out one like her, then. Families like that always wind up with someone crazy at the helm sooner or later.”
“You think she’s running the family?” Nyx asked neutrally.
“If she w
asn’t before, she definitely is now,” Aegis said. “You think she’d suffer anyone else telling her what to do? My guess is, she’s been running it for a while—and, spending so much time on Seneca, she probably has a few favorites running things on the planet. She probably checks up on them a lot, too. And….” His voice trailed off.
“Yes?” Lesedi asked. There was genuine curiosity in her voice.
“Well, she has some loyalty to them,” Aegis said finally. “Because we shouldn’t have been able to track her the last time—when we killed her. But she knew it was a possibility, so she didn’t go to that planet. She made sure we wouldn’t find everything, even if we found her.”
Talon saw Nyx’s face change, and he sympathized with her feelings. Ghost was scary as a megalomaniac, but she was much more dangerous if she had ties to others—especially a group as nebulous as this one. Who could say how she would act, when they didn’t even have the first idea of what she was trying to protect?
He sank his face into his hands and dug his nails into the skin of his forehead. “This is a fucking mess.”
“It’s hardly a new one,” Lesedi pointed out tartly. “She’s always been acting in their interests, we just have an idea of what those are for the first time.”
That was a good point. Talon picked his head up and nodded.
“So, do we go for the planet?” Nyx asked. When everyone looked at her, she shrugged. “That’s where this is headed, right? Her family’s keeping thousands of people off the grid—the Alliance won’t stand for that. She’s got her people laced through every level of business and government, which means they have to have been forging documentation, right? I’ll bet if we look into her history, there are some things that don’t add up.”
John Hugo nodded, but a moment later, he went entirely still.
Talon thought of Rhea, and a chill went through him. He looked up at Nyx, giving her a silent warning, but she already knew. She gave him a tiny nod.
“We need to know what we’re doing after we get the kid out,” she said, bringing it all full circle. “Lesedi, you said you didn’t find at those coordinates we sent? That’s disappointing.”
“Ah.” Lesedi looked pleased. “Unless I’m very much mistaken, those coordinates are either where Rhea is being held, or they’re the next stop on the route. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to check that without being obvious, as they’re int he middle of nowhere. I did mean to ask, however—did you leave the buoy where you found it?”
Nyx nodded. “Yes. We weren’t sure what it was.”
“Good,” Lesedi said crisply. “If they even know it exists, then with any luck, they won’t know anyone found it.”
“Can we assume there’s an ally inside the organization, then?” Nyx asked. “Someone looking out for Rhea and willing to help us get her out of there?”
Lesedi was opening her mouth to speak when she seemed to remember Hugo. He was looking at her with hope in every part of him. Lesedi closed her mouth briefly.
“I think Ghost doesn’t have as tight a grip on that organization as she wants,” she said carefully. “If someone was willing to defy her like that, there are likely more people with doubts or divided loyalties. There’s never just one weak link.”
Everyone nodded. John Hugo was smiling more confidently now. “ A few people have defected,” he said. “Well, as you all know.”
“We need to figure out what’s there, then,” Nyx picked up. “Once we have Rhea back, we’ll need to plan an assault on Eternas.” Her voice was wry. “Aleksandr Soras taught us what can go wrong with that sort of thing, and what we’ll need to look out for.”
Talon scanned the faces of the others. Hugo and Lesedi were staring at the screens, clearly deep in thought. Tera was looking down at the floor, likely considering her father. She did not look up at Talon, though he waited a moment to see if she would; he felt a pang. She had unknowingly worked to keep him in power, and that was a difficult thing to confront repeatedly.
“I’m sending you all the data we got from the staffing company,” Nyx said. “Not a lot of it tied in directly, but the more points we have on Ghost’s web, the closer we are to figuring out what’s going on.”
Everyone nodded.
Lesedi looked at Hugo now. “We’re close,” she told him. “These are the most capable people I’ve ever worked with.” She stopped short of promising that Rhea would be found alive—she was too scrupulously honest for that, Talon knew—but she gave Hugo a smile.
He managed to find one to give to her, and he looked at the cameras. “Thank you all,” he said quietly. “You don’t know what this means to me.”
Talon nodded and ended the call on his end after the usual round of pleasantries. He looked over at Tersi and was going to suggest that the other man go bring this news to Dess, and then something, some half-buried instinct, rose in his chest.
Caution. Where it came from, he wasn’t sure—but he knew to follow it.
“You want to spar?” he asked Tersi.
“Sure.” Tersi gave a weary chuckle. “I could use it, the past few days I’ve had.”
“Sounds good.” It didn’t, actually. Now that Talon thought about it, the last thing he wanted to do was spar with someone who had an unrequited crush. On the other hand, it got Tersi where he wanted him—out of the way. “I’ll meet you in the armory in a few. Just have to talk to Jester.”
He waited to make sure Tersi was heading towards the armory, and then he set off in the other direction—towards the bridge, and the guest bunk.
CHAPTER TEN
THIS TIME, when Dess opened the door for Talon, she immediately craned around him to see if Tersi was there, too. Her face was lighting up in a smile—which changed to confusion when she saw that he wasn’t present.
“Ah….” She gave Talon a bemused look. “What can I help you with?”
“Just wondered how everything was going,” Talon said easily. “I know it can be difficult to get research done without your usual office, so I wanted to make sure you had whatever you needed from us.”
“Oh.” She rubbed at her forehead and gave a weary laugh. “Right. Yeah, it’s been—well, I’m still making progress.” She looked around. “Do you want me to … fitting both of us in here will be a bit tricky. Well, maybe if I duck under the desk.”
Normally, Talon would assure her that it was fine, and offer to help her set up in the war room. In this case, however, he wasn’t in any rush for her to feel more comfortable. He followed her inside, let her maneuver her way around the desk, and then, instead of sitting down, leaned against the top bunk, partially blocking the door. He had planned this ship to accommodate the height of the average Dragon, but he still looked out of scale in this room, and he was intending to use that.
He gave her his blandest smile and nodded to the desk, where a computer and several pages of notes were spread out.
“Oh. Right.” Dess looked, indeed, the faintest bit claustrophobic. She was a consummate professional, however, and trained in hostage negotiation, so she settled her shoulders and clearly made the decision to keep herself at ease.
That was all right. Talon had plenty of time.
Dess sorted through the papers and picked one of them up. She held it out to Talon with a practiced smile.
“This is a list of Maryam Samuels’ last known initiatives in the Senate,” she explained. “I have another list of initiatives she signed on with, but this is the ones she was instrumental in introducing. I think it paints a clearer picture of her priorities.”
“Oh?” Talon looked up, interested by the surety in her tone.
“There are a lot of reasons to lend support to something,” Dess explained. “She was very, very good at getting people to owe her favors. It’s actually one of the most important predictors of how effective a politician is—how many favors they’re owed, I mean. So there’s value in signing on to things you either don’t care about much, or even things you dislike, but don’t dislike very much—if you get
the goodwill of someone who will be useful to you later. And if you look at her record….” She shifted around papers and handed over a much thicker stack.
Talon raised his eyebrows at it.
“Yes,” Dess said with a laugh. “You can see that she was very good at finding initiatives like that. She had her staff constantly scanning to see who was submitting what, and it was rare that her daily schedule did not include several meetings with other senators, in order to discuss all of these votes. She wasn’t in the habit of asking for anything in return, either. She rarely accepted meetings to do with her own initiatives, which was really quite clever.”
“You’re going to have to explain that to me.” Talon remembered his early years, when he’d tried to go through every conversation one step ahead of the other person, always pretending he knew everything about everything.
He’d aged out of that, thank God. Life was much simpler this way.
Luckily, Dess was someone who seemed to genuinely delight in sharing knowledge. She leaned against the bed frame as well, either consciously or unconsciously mimicking his posture. With her being trained in the particular way she had been, Talon could not tell how much was carefully planned, how much was habit, and how much was simply Dess.
“There’s a social contract made with the art of giving favors,” she explained. Her hands waved as she explained. “Say I’m a requisitions officer, for instance. You ask for some supply that’s difficult to get, and I go out of my way to get it for you quickly.”
She waited for Talon to nod, and he did so.
“Now, the natural human instinct at that point is to do something nice in return,” Dess explained. “That’s pretty basic, and most of us use that both consciously and unconsciously in our interactions. So, maybe you talk to one of my coworkers and find out that I like blueberry muffins. You go get a blueberry muffin and bring it to me. Now we’re even, right?”
“Are those really the same thing?” Talon frowned.
“Ah!” Her face lit up. “That’s one of the interesting things. It doesn’t actually matter, in general, if the two favors are comparable.”