The Dangerous Type

by Loren Rhoads

  Anger made her shaky. Ariel argued, “What does love even mean to Raena? She’s never seen another person as an equal. Either she had to take their orders, or she held their lives in her hands. She had our lives in her hands, Gavin. She let us go.”

  “What are you talking about, Ariel? I thought you were sisters.” He made the final word a curse. “That’s pretty much a gig for life.”

  She wanted to step back but was afraid to bump into the lockers behind her. He was too close. When he lost it, she was going to get hurt. As much as she wanted to argue, wanted to make him see reason, she didn’t want him to kill her. She knew he was capable of it. Trying to defuse him, she asked, “What am I to you, Gavin? We both know I’m not your rival for her.”

  He stared at her, unwilling to back down.

  She saw it in his face and nodded. Anything they’d had before was over. “Thank you for being honest with me. I’ll have Tarik drop you at Mallech. You can negotiate with Kai, get your ship out of hock, do whatever you need to do.”

  “We can’t let her go alone,” he protested.

  “I know,” she said. “You can’t let her go.”

  Her compassion infuriated him. “I can’t believe you’re going to let him have her, Ariel. You know what that means.”

  “She didn’t want me to die for her,” Ariel reminded, finally figuring out how to turn enough to step back. “Only you want me to die for her. And getting killed by Thallian isn’t going to bring her back to you. She’s gone, Gavin. She left you.”

  He swung at her, but she was ready. He hadn’t seen her pick up Kavanaugh’s gun from the acceleration couch, but she couldn’t miss at this range. She only had to take the first slap before she shot him.

  * * *

  Horrified, Jaden watched the news clip again. The footage was grainy and difficult to make out, but he watched in growing certainty as the little woman Uncle Revan and Jain had been hunting demolished the family’s soldiers. She worked from one to the next, fast and assured, and took down everyone in her path. Including Uncle Revan.

  Jaden checked the time-stamp on the footage. It had been recorded earlier in the evening: morning on Kai. Odds were that no one else in the family had seen it yet.

  He didn’t know what to do. It was his watch now. He sat alone in the monitoring room. He could call someone, report . . . but whom could he confide in? If he told another of the boys, he might take credit for the find and then Jaden would get in trouble for not stumbling on it on his own watch. If he told Uncle Merin, he would remember that Jaden had been the first one to see the video of the girl, the one who had drawn Revan and Jain into her trap. If he told his father that the girl had escaped . . .

  Jaden trembled, wracked with indecision. There was no one to whom he could unburden himself, no one he could give this terrible news. No matter what happened, he would be punished for being the messenger.

  He could ignore the video. Pretend he didn’t see it and leave it for someone else to discover in the morning.

  That wouldn’t protect him though, and he knew it. He’d be in trouble for missing such an important development. They would think he had slept at his post again or wasted the hours playing games. He couldn’t dodge this.

  So he did the only other thing he could think of. In order to buy himself some time, he wrote a quick little program to filter the news. He didn’t want to block all the news coming from Kai. That would be suspicious. Still, he could make certain that word of the fight—with its anonymous assailants and unclaimed bodies—never reached the people who wanted the news most.

  * * *

  Ariel looked up from Sloane’s body to find Kavanaugh in the passageway, one of her guns in hand.

  “He dead?” Tarik asked.

  “He wishes.” Ariel returned Kavanaugh’s pistol hilt first. “Thanks for your help.”

  “I’m sorry it came to that.”

  “Me, too.” She knelt at Gavin’s side, turning his head gently to take his pulse. “I wish this ship had a hold.”

  “What are you gonna do with him?”

  “I guess we can lock him in my cabin.” She wasn’t happy about the possibility of him trashing her stuff, but what else were they going to do? Lash him to the galley couch? Then they’d have to deal with his insanity every time they left the cockpit.

  “I’ll get him,” Tarik offered. He bent down and slung the older man up onto his back. “Lead the way.”

  * * *

  Sloane’s muscles ached as the stun wore off. He sprawled across Ariel’s bunk, remembering that she liked a mattress that cradled her and sheets so smooth they felt like water. In the last week, he’d taken pleasure in following her with his eyes. She’d been obliging as he sated himself on her body. He had to admit though, he was over her. He had loved her, in his way, back when she was young and full of fire. Now she was cautious and old. She had kids and her mother to care for. She had a life where she could accommodate him, but he didn’t want to be settled.

  He knew he was lucky she hadn’t pitched him out the airlock. He was warm, safe for the moment, and up until he’d slapped Ariel, he’d had options. But Raena was gone and nothing else mattered.

  All those years he’d thrown money away on the Dart, believing it kept him focused on finding Raena, and now the obsession wouldn’t leave him, even though he’d been clean for weeks. Was it possible that he’d become addicted to her?

  The memory of their first meeting overwhelmed him. He closed his eyes tight against it, but that was no defense. She’d looked so young and so lost, drinking alone in a dive on Nizarrh. Coalition Command had offered him good money to bring her in. He wasn’t in a position to ask why, figuring simply that anyone wanted by the Empire was looking for asylum.

  Money was tight those days, so Sloane took what jobs he could. If that meant running Messiah from time to time, he didn’t have to like it, but he did have to eat. It wouldn’t have been his preference to take Raena along with him on that particular jaunt, but Imperial soldiers crawled all over Nizarrh. Odds were she’d be caught before he could get back to her.

  Gavin was smitten from the first by Raena’s attitude. She’d descended low enough that she honestly didn’t care what happened to her, so long as Thallian never touched her again. That level of nihilism found an echo in Sloane.

  Then their incipient romance went to hell. Thallian’s men boarded Sloane’s ship. He’d stowed Raena, the tiny little thing, inside one of the cargo lockers he’d hidden in the walls. It had been shielded—she should have been safe—but the commander dragged his robot arm along the wall and forced Sloane to open any panel that sounded unusual.

  Sloane watched Raena shot down just before Thallian’s soldiers left him to die in a broken bag of Messiah.

  The unconscious girl dragged away by the circle of soldiers was a hell of an image to wake up with. Sloane really didn’t have much choice about going after her. He needed the money she’d bring from the Coalition to pay off Outrider for the wasted Messiah, as well as the stuff the soldiers stole on their way out the door.

  The med tech ID was easy to come by. He’d spent enough time in detentions of one form or another that he figured he could bluff his way into this one. It wasn’t a grand plan, but it had the elegance of simplicity. And when he saw what Thallian had done to her in the cell, he knew he’d made the right choice.

  But he couldn’t get her off the ship. They could have avoided the soldiers, but Raena didn’t really want to escape. Escape meant more running. She was tired. She wanted out.

  With the clarity of hindsight, he realized that the kindest thing he could have done for her was to put a bolt in her eye.

  He remembered his last glimpse of her then: a goddess in black, killing with such relish that he smiled to watch her. Apparently, Thallian’s troops were less afraid of death than they were of their commander. They were willing to risk death to capture Raena alive.

  He should have run after her then. He should have died at her side. He could have
saved them both decades of torment.

  Now she had vanished once more and he didn’t even have the Imperial recording of her trial as a starting point.

  If Ariel kept her word—when had she not?—she’d drop him off on Mallech. He could scrape together a new identity, return to Kai City heading an “official” investigation, get himself back into their former hotel room, and pray that Raena left him something to trace on the room computer. If that didn’t work, he’d have to interrogate Thallian’s surviving henchmen. They’d pretty much abdicated their humanity when they tortured Lim to death. Sloane saw no reason he shouldn’t sink to their level.

  He didn’t have anything left that meant anything to him beyond the search for Raena. He wondered if he had ever told her he loved her.

  CHAPTER 12

  Since she’d nominated herself the evil mastermind of this adventure, Raena chose the biggest cabin on the stolen transport. Evil had its perks; she’d seen plenty of evidence of that.

  She had traveled on a similar diplomatic transport while she served on the Arbiter. This one was slightly different, less posh. She wondered if Thallian ever let anyone else take his private transport out for a spin. Maybe it simply hadn’t survived the War.

  Beyond the door, her crew settled into the rest of the ship. She heard laughter and voices, but didn’t hurry out to meet them. Mykah vouched for them, which was good enough for now. Pranksters would suit this excursion fine. Anyway, she didn’t want to get attached.

  Mykah commed her when it was time to strap herself down. Once the transport left Kai and got under way, Raena searched her new cabin thoroughly, looking for some revelations about Thallian’s older brother. Who had Revan Thallian been? Why had he served Jonan instead of vice versa? Did he enjoy hunting down his brother’s ex-girlfriends? Was she the first or only the most recent?

  His cabin was unsurprisingly spartan. The only personal objects she found lying around were the generator leads ending in alligator clips, from which she deduced that Revan Thallian felt the need to torture himself. She found a certain kinship in the idea. She liked that he was comfortable enough with the predilection that he didn’t hide the evidence in a locker. Instead, it was right out on the desk for anyone to see.

  When she opened his closet, she found it filled with black clothing. No surprise there, either. Black clothing didn’t show the blood; Jonan taught her that. When she worked for him, she wore only black, too.

  As she poked through the black shirts, the black jackets, the black trousers—all carefully sorted and hung so as to avoid wrinkles—a flash of indigo caught her eye. She nibbled her bottom lip, amused, as she pulled the dress Gavin had given her to the front of the closet.

  This damn dress was going to follow her everywhere. She intentionally left it behind in Gavin’s hideaway on Brunzell, but one of the Thallians must have retrieved it from the closet. It wasn’t that she objected to the cut or even its particular color. The dress just felt like one more piece of evidence that she had been owned, that she owed a debt that she could only pay off with her body. She wanted to be done with all that.

  In point of fact, she never wanted to wear anything again that she didn’t choose for herself. She considered pitching the stupid thing into the incinerator, but something stopped her. She wondered if perhaps she might still have a use for the dress, if she could use it to send a message to Jonan, maybe turn it against him somehow. She’d have to consider how to make it a weapon.

  Raena went to sit on the precisely made bunk and rested the generator leads in her hand. She was extremely tempted to go back to the hold and torture Thallian’s son. The force of the craving caught her off-guard. For the first time in decades, she had someone entirely in her power. The boy existed at her whim. By tormenting him, her thoughts whispered, she could get back some of what Thallian had stolen from her. She could begin punishing Thallian for everything he’d made her do. Since he’d taught her how to torture—and how to drink pleasure from it—didn’t it make sense to apply the lesson to the victim he’d offered up to her?

  She imagined the things she might do. Jain Thallian was just a boy, fourteen or fifteen at most, who had grown up sheltered from the galaxy. Cloistered, one could say. She wondered if he’d ever seen a live girl before. Ever touched one.

  Her hands ached with the desire to disassemble him.

  The downside, she realized, was that she’d have to deal with Mykah and his crew afterward. At this point, the voyage was still a game to Mykah. He had become a space pirate, hijacking a ship from a band of killers and ransoming a hostage to his family. In his mind, his friends were the good guys. Raena found that innocence a pleasant change from Ariel’s worry and Gavin’s ennui. She should let the pranksters remain innocent as long as they could with a bad influence like herself around.

  Raena suspected that, in reality, there was nothing useful she could learn from the boy anyway. When the transport eventually reached Thallian’s hidey-hole, she’d need security codes to sneak past the family’s defenses. But judging from how easily the family had given up every other secret for which she’d probed, it was only a matter of time before Coni teased the passwords out of the ship’s computer or one of the boys told her all that he knew.

  Thallian never encouraged Raena to be conservative with prisoners, but this might be a good opportunity to experiment. Sparing Jain might ultimately be more beneficial than killing him.

  * * *

  When Raena came out of the cabin, Mykah was eager to introduce her to the rest of the crew he’d brought along. He led her into the cockpit. In the driver’s seat hunched Haoun, a big bipedal reptilian creature armored with green hexagonal scales. He’d driven tourist shuttles on Kai and would pilot the transport. He nodded hello.

  “What do you think?” Raena asked in her newly learned Galactic Standard. “Is this old tub drivable?”

  “The old Earther drives aren’t fast, but they’ve kept this one in perfect shape. It should get us there, as long as we’re not racing anyone.” His translator made him sound very urbane, while the actual sound of his sibilant voice raised the hairs on the back of Raena’s neck, some kind of vestigial reaction.

  “No one else knows where we’re headed.”

  Under the console lay Vezali, who had tentacles rather than legs. They shifted so constantly that Raena wasn’t certain if she’d counted them right. Vezali had worked for one of the casinos, rebuilding the gambling machines to keep them winning in the House’s favor.

  “You know the pachinko machines at the Shiapan casino plinked in a certain sequence as they were getting ready to pay out?” Raena asked.

  Vezali blinked her single eye. “I’m surprised you could hear that on the gambling floor.” Her metal-inflected voice came through a translator around her waist. “It’s not just the pachinko machines. Almost every machine had a tell, so the casino staff could move in and take over the soon-to-be winners.”

  “I should’ve stuck around longer,” Raena said.

  “Nah. Their security is trained to watch for people who pick up the tells. They would have encouraged you to play somewhere else.”

  Raena remembered the apes who’d trailed her and smiled. Not subtle. Even Ariel had noticed them. Good thing she’d quit while ahead.

  Getting back to business, Raena said, “I need to have one of the escape pods shielded. I want it to read like there’s only one occupant as we go down to the planet, only the boy.”

  “Let me look it over,” Vezali said. “I’m sure I can rig something. It will depend on what kind of supplies they’ve left me to pillage.”

  “Thank you.”

  In the glare of the copilot’s panel, where she’d wedged herself to leave room for the others, Mykah’s blue-furred girlfriend protested, “Keeping the boy awake is dangerous.”

  “Keeping him alive is dangerous,” Raena countered. “Sleep gas could solve your problem, but I don’t advocate it. People react differently to the gas. It might just give him a screaming headach
e. It could put him into a coma. That won’t help us.” She held her gaze until the blue girl backed down, then assured, “He’s not coming out of the hold. He won’t ever see any of you. You won’t have to deal with him at all.”

  Coni subsided into the copilot’s chair, arms crossed, clearly unhappy.

  “Any luck finding the clearance codes?” Raena persisted.

  “I’m still trying to decrypt the log,” Coni said. “I’ll concentrate on this current journey of theirs. The last time they used this transport was almost five years ago, on some kind of a supply run.”

  “If it isn’t any trouble,” Raena said, “send the translated logs back to my cabin when you get them figured out. I’m curious to know what they had to say about this little excursion.”

  Coni nodded, so Raena ducked back out. No need to make nice, if her mere presence was going to creep the blue girl out. She wondered if it was simple jealousy. Had Coni come along merely to keep an eye on her boyfriend? Mykah said she was good at cryptography. Raena hoped Coni was on board for the adventure.

  * * *

  Eilif was forbidden access to the computers, so she couldn’t search the news herself. She hung around the computer room, hoping to hear the boys find something about Revan and Jain. She wondered that they hadn’t heard anything unusual from the pleasure planet where Revan had been headed. Maybe one woman’s disappearance wasn’t a big enough story to make the galactic news. Maybe tourists vanished from Kai every day.

  Still, it seemed strange that Revan’s men could swoop in, capture their objective, and escape without anyone reporting her gone. After the news debacle of Jain’s first kill, Eilif was impressed that Revan had managed this kidnapping so quietly. She was glad he hadn’t put her son or himself at any more risk.

  If she were honest, she preferred Revan of all the brothers. He’d always been gentle with her. He’d even remembered to thank her from time to time. She knew she was unworthy of anything more, but the few pleasantries they’d shared made her heart soar.