Dragon's Nemesis (The Dragon Corps Book 7)

by Natalie Grey

  “All right, that’s enough.” The older man came out of his chair and grabbed Tersi by the front of his shirt, pushing him inexorably to the door and out of the room.

  “He’s—”

  “Your captain,” Aegis said firmly. “Go cool down.” He murmured something Dess couldn’t catch and then shut the door. To Talon, he said, “I’ll handle it.” He jerked his head at Dess. “You go, too. No, other door.”

  Talon shot her a look that was far from friendly, but the depth of his reaction seemed to have surprised him. He shook his head and left through the door at the other end of the room, with a last, murmured comment for Aegis, who nodded and ushered him out.

  “And don’t go finding Tersi,” the older man called after him. Talon, now out of sight, must have given him a look, because Aegis raised an eyebrow.

  There was a chuckle, and Talon was gone.

  Aegis sighed and rubbed at his jaw.

  “We’ll let you handle it,” Nyx said. She added softly, “Good job. They don’t clash very often, but when they do….”

  “Yeah.” Aegis shook his head. “I’ll be in touch. Lesedi—did Hugo put it together that they hadn’t mentioned Eternas?”

  “He must have, by now.” Lesedi let out a long breath. “I’ll talk to him about it.” She nodded to him, and both screens flickered to dark.

  Aegis turned to look at Dess. He just looked, and waited, and Dess felt as lost as she had when she walked in. She had almost literally felt the temperature drop when Talon got angry, but now he was chuckling and things seemed better….

  And she still wasn’t sure where she stood.

  “I wouldn’t,” Aegis said finally, “make any more references to the captain not caring who lives and who dies. He’s a cold-hearted bastard when he needs to be, but if you think he kills without even caring who gets caught in the mess, you’re vastly mistaken.”

  “I know.” Dess looked down at her hands, shaking. Then she looked back at him. “No. I don’t know that. You all joke, all the time—about killing people, about them dying.”

  “We’re good at it,” Aegis said bluntly. “Sometimes a situation needs a diplomat, and God bless people who can do things that way, but sometimes, especially out here, a situation needs us. That doesn’t mean it’s easy.” He paused, then added gruffly, “Any more than it’s easy for you, I’d imagine, having seen what you’ve seen.”

  Dess stared at him silently, tears welling up in her eyes.

  “We joke because we have to,” Aegis told her. “It’s how we stay sane. We kill the people that go after our team, and we kill the people who go after innocent bystanders—because you know as well as I do that people like that stack the deck, and letting them get away with one thing, bending to them even once, just sets them up for the next time.”

  She knew what he was talking about at once and the tears spilled over her lashes and down her cheeks. Dess doubled over, wrapping her arms around her waist.

  To her surprise, a chair was pulled out beside her and she felt his hand on her back, rubbing up and down comfortingly as she rocked back and forth with the tears.

  “It’s isn’t fair,” she choked out. “It isn’t fair. He’s my brother, he didn’t do anything wrong. He should have to—but she’s just four, I can’t let her die for it, either. If I save one of them, it should be her. I know that. Harry’s older, he can try to get out some other way.” Her voice was almost unintelligible. “But if I save Rhea and you go in there, if any of Ghost’s people die—they’re going to kill him, and it isn’t fair. It should have to be that way.”

  She couldn’t stop crying now that she’d started, and he pulled her over to lean against his shoulder, reminding her of no one so much as her Uncle Pete—who would probably shoot her on sight if he saw her now. The thought only made her cry harder.

  “We’re gonna get him back,” Aegis told her gruffly.

  “You can’t promise that.”

  “We’ll do all we can. I mean that.” A gave her arm a little shake. When she looked up, his brown eyes were serious. “I do. The captain’s angry, but he’s not gonna hold a grudge against your brother. If there’s a way to get the kid out, he will.”

  Dess stared at him, tears running down her cheeks, and shook her head. “There isn’t any way. You and I both know that. I kept hoping, but there isn’t any way.” She wiped at her cheeks and her nose. “I’m going to save Rhea,” she promised. “I am, I know it’s the right thing to do. I just didn’t think it would ever be one of my family against someone I was trying to save, and … it sucks, that’s all. It’s not fair.” The words didn’t even do justice to it. She looked over at Aegis and saw sympathy there, and she said, again, the thought that had been circling in her head for weeks: “It’s not fair.”

  And she felt something hollow in her chest, a sort of hole that wasn’t quite grief. The grief was so far down that once she fell in, she would drown in it and there would be no way to get out. She wasn’t ever going to see Harry again, and one of the last things he would hear was that his own sister had signed his death warrant.

  She’d loved her Aunt Maryam once. Now she couldn’t remember a time that love hadn’t been something that hurt.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “THEY KNOW ABOUT THE SHIPS.” It was her Uncle Nate’s voice.

  “I know.” Ghost did not turn around from the window. This was the same place where they had met the other day, though someone had cleared away Ezra’s body.

  She expected him to wait, or say something stupid, or eventually slink away like everyone else did, but instead he came to stand beside her. There were two sets of footsteps. She looked over to see both him and Aunt Gee.

  “What do we do?” Nate asked her. It wasn’t despairing. He was asking for an order, and she did not miss his choice of words: we.

  She got the sense that they were trying not only to stay on her good side—as they should, with any head of the family—but also to reassure her that she was not a terrifying monster. And it was an admirable effort, really, but both of them were terrified of her. She could see it easily in the way their pulse sped up every time she looked at them, in the way their pupils dilated, in the subtle tension in their muscles. She had known these things before, but it felt different to notice them with her enhanced senses.

  And she truly was everything they feared.

  “How did you know?” Aunt Gee asked, before Ghost could answer her uncle. “About the ships.”

  Ghost smiled slightly. Her cheek had been repaired now and her expressions were less gruesome.

  “I am in all of the systems,” she said.

  They frowned. They still did not understand. No one seemed to understand why she had done what she had done. To be the head of the family was to rely on a network of spies and informers. One must always be aware. It was a great deal like running a government, and in her past life, Ghost had always been interested in the mechanisms by which the Alliance watched its citizens. She had learned a lot from that.

  But there were limits to a human network—limits electronic surveillance did not have. There were always those who made bets that cameras couldn’t see them, or that the humans behind those cameras wouldn’t notice a slight disturbance.

  Ghost was nowhere near so fallible. Since she had begun preparing herself to leave her human body, she had been testing the limits of her consciousness, upgrading herself and feeding her mind snippets of the raw streams of data she would need to take in.

  She had headed off any number of family rebellions during those years. They were rebellions her sources hadn’t told her about, and it had been amusing to watch her family turn on one another, accusing their friends and even children of betraying them. It hadn’t been humans who betrayed them, but surveillance systems.

  At the time, she had not told anyone the truth. Now she saw that she could have done so and they still wouldn’t believe it. Her aunt and uncle clearly didn’t.

  She was the one who had first noticed the Dr
agons on the security cameras. It would have been cheaper to hire mercenaries to patrol the shipyard on Qaryat, but she had insisted on cameras. Camera feeds, she could scan. She could create subroutines for unexpected flickers.

  Almost as soon as the Dragons had landed, she had ordered the few guards that there to evacuate Harry Tasper. He’d been gone before even the Dragons could get to him; she had learned her lesson when it came to them. She wouldn’t let Harry be captured yet; he could still serve some use.

  Though those particular uses had changed since he’d been taken. Ghost had first thought that with Harry in her control, she might persuade the rest of the Tasper family to return. It had quickly become clear that that was not going to happen, but in Harry’s case, she had also not been keen to lose one of her best engineers. She’d sent Harry to Qaryat with the promise that if he did good work, his family would be forgiven for their defection.

  A false promise, of course, and some part of him knew it—but people were eager to believe in mercy, especially when they were backed into a corner.

  She had thought it was working, too. Everything on the ships was proceeding on pace, some projects slightly ahead, others slightly behind—on the balance, within expected parameters. Nothing had seemed suspicious … until that distress call.

  And that call meant that nothing he had done could be trusted. It meant she might not even want to use those ships. The other engineers said they hadn’t seen anything wrong or unusual in what he was building, but Harry was close to a genius in those matters. He might have done things no one else could even find, and the ships would fail when she needed them most.

  Frustration filled her, and she shoved it away. The Dragons did not have him. They did not have Rhea. They had Dess, of course, but Dess was crippled by her fear for her brother.

  Ghost knew her well. Little Dess had always been so eager to please, so good at playing by the rules. Empathetic and caring, she had a first-rate mind, but lacked the resolve ever to be a true threat to Ghost. Accordingly, Ghost had indulged her, always brought her little gifts when she was a child, always thanked her for her work as she got older.

  Would they send Dess to negotiate for Rhea now? Ghost was fairly sure they would. John Hugo, like so many of the Alliance, had far too much faith in people. He did not know, as Ghost did, that Dess’s fear for Harry would break her.

  And, while most of what went on in the Dragon ships was still beyond Ghost’s ability to get to, their passage through any public spaces would be something she could track.

  She stared at the ships, tapping her fingers absent-mindedly on her arm. She had taken care to add sub-routines in that gave her little fidgets and blinks, the sort of thing that helped other people see her as a “real” person.

  “Tell the family to pull back to Eternas,” she said finally. There was a hastily-indrawn breath from both Nathan and Regina, and Ghost looked over, annoyed that she clearly must explain her decision. “John Hugo has found several members of the family,” she said crisply. “The Taspers have not yet told him about Eternas—her father is trying to negotiate for Harry—but they might break at any time.

  “And that’s not the only thing that might go wrong. They might also find other members of the family, and either break or detain them. The senate might give advance clearance for people to search near Eternas.

  “What we need is for the family to be ready to run, to find a new home. Resources are being loaded into ships on Eternas. The family needs to be ready. We can’t wait for them to come back once the news breaks.”

  Privately, she doubted that all of them would make it back in time, and part of her despaired at that. Unlike many others who tried to rise in the family—or in the Senate—because they wanted to rule over others, because they hated others, Ghost had wanted to rise because she believed that she alone could create the world her family needed.

  So far, she had been correct. The family had flourished under her care. Eternas prospered, and the family, both on and off the planet, had seen their fortunes rise.

  Now, though it would cost them much, she would not leave them without protection.

  And it did not escape her notice that now, when they needed to find a new home amongst the stars, she was the best leader the family could have. Who else could hope to analyze all of the data humanity had, in order to find a new planet to live on?

  No one would be better than Ghost.

  “We’ll give the orders,” Uncle Nate said. “Gee and I will—”

  “Actually,” Regina interrupted, “I think there’s something else I’d like to attend to first.”

  Ghost looked over, and was interested to see that her uncle was frowning. He didn’t know what his cousin wanted yet.

  Interesting.

  “Yes?” Ghost asked, as neutrally as she could.

  “If there’s a way to stave this off,” Aunt Gee said, “we should. I think you agree. You’re planning to leave if we have to, but if there’s any way to remain here….” She waited, testing the waters.

  “Of course,” Ghost said. Privately, she knew it was only a matter of time until Eternas was found. But there was no reason to tell Aunt Gee that.

  “One of the pieces of information and leverage they have is the Taspers,” Regina said. Her mouth curved in a smile so cold that it was almost like looking in a mirror. “And I’ll bet you that John Hugo is planning to use Dess for … well.” She did not speak of Rhea, not in front of Uncle Nate. “Someone should go negotiate with her, and I think it should be me. She thinks she’s playing for one thing … but if it’s done well, we can get so much more out of her than she can get out of us.”

  Ghost’s smile this time was genuine.

  “Do it,” she said.

  They headed away, Nathan whispering to Regina, and her clearly not answering his questions about just what Dess would be negotiating for.

  “One other thing,” Ghost called.

  “Yes?” Both of them turned and spoke in unison.

  “Tell Geoff that when Harry’s ship arrives … I want him brought directly to me.” She saw the fear in her eyes as she turned back to the ships, and she was pleased by it.

  It did no harm to have even the loyal remember what she was capable of.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE HULL CREAKED and popped slightly as Talon sat in his quarters, elbows on his knees, his eyes fixed on the middle distance. Words were echoing in his head: I know that it doesn’t matter who gets hurt as long as you complete your mission! Dess’s words, passionate, full of hatred—and, in a sense, absolutely true.

  He’d known since he became a Dragon that he was different from many others. Not all of them, of course; he suspected that Alina shared his sense of morality and his ability to make a decision and follow through without regret. Sometimes he wished things were different, but he made the best choices he could. It was pointless to wonder what if, or to want everything to come out perfectly.

  The situations he was called into weren’t ones that could come out perfectly.

  Even in the Dragons, though, most people had what he’d come to realize was a more normal outlook on life. They regretted violence. They relived it in their heads. It followed them like a shadow, and Talon had been grateful that he didn’t have those ghosts to carry with him. He’d thought he was lucky.

  Now, for the first time, he felt ashamed of it. He sat alone in his rooms, the lights glaring in his eyes, and he felt broken.

  He’d laughed and joked with Aegis, because it was automatic. Because he was used to helping the rest of them through the aftermath of the things they did, no matter how he felt. His desire to smooth things over had been as strong as the other man’s. He didn’t want his XO to think he’d gone off to sulk.

  He sank his face into his hands and realized he was shaking. The thought of them—any of them—seeing him like this….

  There was a beep from his computer and he looked up. Tera’s name flashed on the screen.

  He thought about
not answering it, and she must have guessed that would be the case. A moment later, some hidden override was tripped and her face appeared on screen, peering at his empty desk chair. His camera panned with a low whir, also under her control, and her face went still when she saw him.

  “Talon.”

  If there was anyone else in the world who understood the way his mind worked, it was Tera, but he was too ashamed even to say the words to her. He looked at her and felt a dawning sense of horror.

  Was he just another hired killer?

  Dear God, was this how Cade had felt, all those years ago after the Blood Moon? He and Talon had been alone on the bridge when Talon decided to vent the ship, killing the entire crew of slavers and the head of their syndicate … along with every slave on board. Talon knew he had saved thousands more lives from that syndicate, and at the time, he’d made the choice and not looked back.

  Now, though, it threatened to swallow him—just like Cade had struggled with it, alone on New Arizona. Talon had found Cade drinking himself to death in a dive bar, ready to die in the snow; now he was frankly amazed that there had been anything left of Cade to find. How had the man lived with this for two years?

  “Lesedi told me,” Tera said quietly.

  Talon looked down at his hands and said nothing.

  “I was going to….” Tera’s voice failed.

  Surprised, Talon looked up. Tera didn’t often get overwhelmed by emotion. Now, as he had seen before, her face was almost expressionless. She kept any hint of what was going on from showing in her eyes. Instead, her mouth was what betrayed her, her lips pressed together and trembling with the depth of what she was feeling.

  “I was going to tell you that it was okay,” Tera said. “That there are two of us, at least. But I don’t think that’s what you need to hear right now—at least not from me.” She hesitated. “I love you,” she said quietly, and then she ceded the chair to one of her ship mates.