Paladin

by Natalie Grey

  “So this motherfucker thinks he’s going after an undefended colony full of innocent bystanders, huh?”

  Barnabas’ face went absolutely cold. “Yes. He does. And we are going to make sure he learns how much of a mistake that was.”

  Shinigami tried to swivel in the chair, cursed internally when the chair didn’t move, and flickered over to the other side of the room to make her avatar lean against the wall.

  “What if he finds out about the Jotun fleet in advance?”

  “Then we’ll know there’s a spy in their high command,” Barnabas replied. “He may have advance notice, which would not be optimal, but regardless, he’ll have an entire fleet to face down.” He frowned. “I hope the Jotun fleet knows what they’re doing. They’re confident, but…”

  “Their track record suggests they’re good at small-scale engagements, at least.” Shinigami brought up a few reports on the displays. She had spent considerable time verifying the capabilities of the fleet.

  She didn’t want to die, after all.

  Barnabas looked them over with his arms crossed. “They really took to technology, I’ll give them that. How, I have no idea. They’re aquatic. How did they learn electronics without killing themselves?”

  Shinigami snickered. “Maybe they started millennia ago and lost thousands in the process.” She shrugged. “My guess is that they appropriated some technology and made some allies, and it all took off from there. You have to give them credit, though. Those ships are insane.”

  “How do you mean?” He frowned.

  “You didn’t see how they’re controlled?” Shinigami hopped up on one of the control panels to sit cross-legged.

  “One of the things you can’t do in a robotic body,” Barnabas remarked.

  “Yeah, yeah. Maybe I’ll just park my body when we come back to the ship and use my avatar.”

  “Leaving the robotic body to stand like a creepy mannequin in the hallway? I think not.”

  “That is such a good idea.”

  “No. No, it’s not. Don’t do that.” Barnabas’ expression was vaguely panicked.

  Shinigami gave him a toothy grin. “Anyway. The Jotun ships. They’re controlled telekinetically. Sort of. That’s the closest word for it.”

  “You’d mentioned that. I thought it was that the powersuits were telekinetic and—”

  “Oh, no. That’s not how it works.” Shinigami brought up some pictures on the display. “You see this? This is Admiral Jutfa. Well, theoretically it is, but they could put a Jotun stuffed animal in there and none of us would be able to tell the difference.”

  Barnabas sank his head into his hands with a groan. “I can never tell who’s calling when I answer the call, and they always expect me to know. How am I supposed to tell them apart?”

  “Fuck if I know.” Shinigami shook her head. “Anyway, you see the admiral isn’t wearing a normal powersuit, right? Well, when they go into battle, they plug the captain of the ship into the ship and they control the whole thing—weapons, maneuvering, all of it. In extreme cases, they can network the tasks and put other people in control, but mostly, the captain just controls all of that at once. They communicate with the officers and operate based on that information.”

  Barnabas stared at her with his mouth hanging open. “That’s not possible.”

  “Oh, but it is.” Shinigami gave him a look that said, I’m as surprised as you are. “Believe me, I didn’t just take all that for granted. I checked.”

  “Holy shit,” Barnabas muttered, then flushed. “My vocabulary has gone over a cliff since I started associating with Tabitha.”

  “It’s good for you.” Shinigami believed strongly that Barnabas needed to unwind a little. Unfortunately, it was almost impossible to get him drunk. “And ‘holy shit’ is about the size of it. People get promoted in the Jotun Navy because they can manage a ship that big. An admiral can manage multiple ships at once.”

  Barnabas was frowning now. “I’m a little worried that we’ve underestimated the Jotuns.”

  “It’s possible, but as far as I can tell they just have really good multitasking abilities. Let’s not panic.” Shinigami shrugged. “After all, Jeltor is a nice guy. Perfectly smart, but not an evil genius by any means.”

  “Still.” Barnabas chewed his lip. “All right. Let’s get Gar and Tafa and tell them the drill. I think I have an idea what Koel is going to do when he sees us there with the fleet.”

  11

  “Don’t you want me to stand still?” Gar questioned. He stood frozen in the act of putting on his armor. His weapons lay neatly to one side, cleaned after their last battle but not yet checked this time.

  Barnabas was methodical to a fault, and he expected the same of Gar.

  “No,” Tafa said impatiently. “The painting isn’t of you, it’s of… Well, you.”

  “You can see how I’d get confused,” Gar joked.

  “It isn’t your face or your shape.” Tafa gestured to him. “It’s of your…what do Luvendi call it? Your essence? All the thoughts and energy that make you who you are.”

  “Thoughts and energy?” Gar considered. “I think humans call it a soul. It’s their closest concept, anyway. Not exactly the same thing. Thoughts are the mind. Energy is…energy. Emotions. The soul is… Now I’m confused.”

  “The riddle,” Barnabas said, poking his head in the door as he went past, “is that if I have a mind and a body and a soul…what am I?” He smiled and disappeared again.

  “I’m going to make a painting about that,” Tafa said slowly.

  “I’m going to get a headache thinking about it,” Gar added.

  “Anyway, the point is, keep moving around. I need to see you move to paint you.” Tafa spread a dollop of red paint on her palette.

  “I’m red?” Gar looked dubious. “I’m from Luvendan. Everything is blue. My eyes are blue. My skin is kind of blue.”

  “Well, your essence is red,” Tafa stated emphatically. “Trust me.”

  “Sure, why not?” Gar adjusted the thin layer that went under his armor and moved on to inspecting his weapons. He disassembled a pistol carefully, checking each piece for grime.

  “You are afraid before battles,” Tafa commented.

  “I am not.” Gar looked up at once, offended. “I’m glad to go into battle. I’m fighting for what’s right.”

  “Those aren’t mutually exclusive.” She swooped the brush across one of the canvases and made a slash on the other, wielding both brushes with precision despite the quick movements. “Gar, your whole life, you’ve feared physical contact. It could damage you. So much of who you are is tied up in being the person who was…fragile. Every time you dealt with someone, both of you knew that you could be beaten to a pulp within minutes. That doesn’t go away in a few months.”

  Gar sighed in exasperation, his hands still on the pistol. Having fewer fingers than a human, he had to concentrate to get the gun to come apart correctly, and Tafa was ruining his focus.

  “Maybe right before a battle isn’t the best time for this.”

  “When would be a good time?” When he said nothing, Tafa nodded. “Exactly. You don’t want to confront it. When you fight, you’re not fighting because it’s the right thing to do, you’re fighting because you want to show all those people who underestimated you that they were wrong.”

  “You make it sound like I don’t care about what’s right!”

  “When you’re in a battle, you don’t—not from what I’ve seen.” She sat next to him. “Gar, you follow Barnabas because you want to do the right thing. I know that. But when it comes time for a battle, you just want to surprise them; make them pay for underestimating you. You know…you know there’s no shame in being what you were before, right?”

  Gar looked down at the guns. He heard the blood pounding in his ears.

  “What I was before,” he said precisely, “was nothing. I was useless.”

  “Not true.” Tafa shook her head. “If that were true, Barnabas would n
ever have enhanced your abilities.

  “Barnabas fights from his heart, Gar. His abilities…they aren’t him. He could be in that body with the strong bones and the speed and all of it, and he still wouldn’t be able to do what he does without his belief. That’s why he chose you. Because you have that, too. Not because he thought you’d hit the hardest when he upgraded your body.”

  Gar realized he was shaking. Ever since he’d left Luvendan he’d been the weak one; the fragile one. Everyone he’d met looked him up and down with contempt. In his work he’d held the uneasy position at the top of the ladder, ordering people around who could have easily killed him—and had often wanted to.

  Leaving that physical weakness behind had been everything he wanted. And yet…

  “I’m more afraid now than I was when I was weak.” The sentiment made no sense, but it was true.

  Tafa nodded. “That’s what the red is. It’s fear. You fear and hate weakness because you believed it defined you. But it never did, Gar. You could be what Barnabas is, but until you accept what you were, you never will.”

  He said nothing, and she moved toward the door to give him some privacy.

  “What is Barnabas?” Gar called after her. “You say I can be what he is, but what is that, to you?”

  Tafa paused. “I’ve been reading about Earth. In their stories, they talk about knights, people who swore on their honor to defend the helpless. But there’s a kind of warrior who’s even more than that—a paladin.”

  Gar frowned. He’d never heard that term before.

  “They’re a myth,” Tafa explained. “Sort of. I think. They draw their power from a deity and wield it like magic.” She paused. “But Barnabas…I think what he draws his power from is the very concept of goodness, itself. Evil is evil because it hurts the innocent. Good is good because it saves them. That is who he is. That is who you could be, Gar.”

  She left Gar to his thoughts.

  Shinigami had been listening, and her avatar wore a speculative expression.

  Barnabas looked up from his schematics and caught sight of it. His brow furrowed. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Not important.” She wasn’t sure what she thought of Tafa’s theory yet—and anyway, he’d be embarrassed to hear it.

  Although she wouldn’t mind embarrassing him.

  She’d keep that in the bank then, to use when she most needed to catch him off-guard. With a grin, Shinigami stood her avatar up and walked over to stare down at the schematics.

  She had found that acting like a human—having the mannerisms that showed she was paying attention—helped her interact with the crew. When they saw expressions and actions, they let their guard down in a different way.

  Barnabas looked over the known specifications for the Avaris, Koel Yennai’s flagship. Some informants speculated he might even be aboard the ship, which Shinigami privately considered to be likely. Koel hadn’t lived at the secret base, after all, and while he might have an even more top-secret base, she guessed that he was the sort of person who couldn’t stay cooped up.

  “No one has ever met their fleet in battle,” Barnabas said worriedly. “They could have weapons we’ve never encountered. Even the Jotuns, who have seen some of their ships, don’t have any idea—and Yennai knows what the Jotuns have. They’ve been all through that information.”

  He rubbed his forehead wearily.

  “Having good weapons isn’t the same as knowing how to use them,” Shinigami pointed out. “It’s like handing a four-year-old a chess board. You can tell them what each piece does. They might even understand it. That doesn’t mean they can win.” She smiled mischievously. “Like you with a chess board, now that I think of it.”

  Barnabas gave her a look. “You want to go? Let’s go.”

  Shinigami gave a pointed look at the corner of the room where the stone chess board Barnabas had commissioned was sitting at a small table. “I would, but I’m incorporeal and can’t pick up the pieces.”

  Barnabas leaned forward with his knuckles braced on the table and a wicked grin on his lips. “You’re worried that if you can’t cheat, you can’t win,” he said softly.

  “I’m afraid of nothing.”

  “Prove it.”

  Shinigami narrowed her eyes. “As soon as this battle is over, old geezer, I’m going to take you down. I’ll crush you so hard the whole group of Rangers won’t be able to play chess for a month. I’ll crush you so hard you can’t look at a chess board. I’ll crush you so hard we’ll have to switch to poker.”

  “Poker?” Barnabas’ mouth twitched. “You want to inject some random chance into our games? Bring. It. On. Chaos only benefits me.”

  Shinigami scoffed and narrowed her eyes. “Organic life forms are ridiculous.”

  Barnabas did not look at all disheartened by that. In fact, he seemed to enjoy it. “Also, I’d like to see you play chess with Tabitha. You think I’m infuriating? She’d break your soul. That woman is chaos personified.”

  Shinigami gave a shudder. She could just picture Tabitha’s attempts to play chess. What does this piece do? I don’t want to move it that way. Okay, but if I could move a castle diagonally I’d have won, so technically I did win.

  “That’s a horrifying thing to imagine,” she confessed.

  From Barnabas’ smile, he planned to use this against her. “Mmmhmm.” He took another look at the schematics and shook his head. “Dwelling on this isn’t going to do any good. I’m going to the armory to get geared up.”

  “I’ll come with you.” Shinigami fell in beside him, and they walked through the halls in silence. Gar was alone in Tafa’s studio, dressed for battle and staring out a window. He didn’t seem to hear them as they passed.

  Shinigami used the scanners in the room to assess him. He seemed troubled, apparently still thinking over what Tafa had said. Shinigami couldn’t understand why it would trouble him. If he didn’t like how he was, why wouldn’t he simply change?

  There was so much about organic life forms that made no sense.

  She’d talk to him about it later.

  She practiced her walking while Barnabas stripped off his jacket and button-down shirt and situated his armor over the thin shirt he always wore. He flexed all his joints to make sure that the armor wouldn’t impede his motions. By this point, it fit like a dream. It was more habit than anything else.

  He checked his weapons and brushed a few specks of grime off—imaginary grime, if Shinigami were to bet. Barnabas never left his weapons in anything but perfect condition.

  He had just slid his Jean Dukes into their holsters when the call came in. It was tagged as being from Jeltor. Shinigami brought it up on the armory’s screen.

  “Jeltor,” Barnabas said. “We’re decelerating in a few minutes.” He frowned. “Did you beat us there?”

  Shinigami also frowned. There was no way the Jotun fleet should have beat them. The Shinigami’s propulsion systems were state of the art, and they’d been closer to the target planet than the Jotun fleet in any case.

  “It’s not that.” Jeltor bobbed anxiously in the tank of his powersuit. “We’ve just received a distress call.”

  “It’s a trap,” Barnabas declared instantly. “They know the Jotun Navy is involved. Don’t get dragged off course.”

  “No,” Jeltor stated urgently. “You don’t understand. The call isn’t for us to come somewhere. It’s… One of our ships has been captured. A civilian transport.”

  Barnabas frowned. “You can’t go after it—”

  But in a flash, Shinigami understood. She cut him off with a shake of her head. “That’s not what Jeltor means. I’ll bet you anything that when the Yennai Corporation fleet shows up, they’ll have that civilian ship right in the middle of them so we can’t shoot.”

  “Yes.” Jeltor sounded bleak. “There are two thousand civilians on that ship. We have to call this off. We can’t let them pay for—”

  “We’re not calling it off.” Barnabas’ voice was hard.
His expression was compassionate as he looked at the screen, however. “They aren’t going to die, Jeltor. He won’t throw away his bargaining chip so early in the game, and there’s something he wants far more than he wants the Jotuns to suffer. He wants me dead.”

  Shinigami sank her head into her hands. She could guess what Barnabas had planned, and it was risky—riskier than she was comfortable with.

  Barnabas looked at her, raising an eyebrow. He could tell what she thought. “Do you have a better plan?” he challenged.

  “No, but that’s not the point.”

  “It’s definitely the point.” His fingers flexed, then clenched. “Koel Yennai is a dangerous bastard, but he’s also vengeful—and that’s our way in. Jeltor?”

  “Yes?”

  “As soon as the Yennai fleet comes in, you and I are transporting to that flagship.”

  12

  Lotar was on the bridge of the Avaris when it came out of FTL.

  He wasn’t at his desk; it was conspicuously empty. Instead, he stood with Koel at the massive windows on the bridge. He could feel the eyes of his fellow analysts. Were they jealous?

  He imagined they were, and it was a heady feeling.

  He had stayed up late into the night, reading Koel’s favorite books on military strategy until his eyes drooped shut. When he had woken up, he’d barely paused to put on a new uniform before presenting himself at Koel’s stateroom. Lotar had plans. He had thoughts about the books he’d read, he had seen the schematics of the strange, hollow ship and its contents, and he was only too eager to talk to Koel about all of it.

  His fear of Koel was entirely gone. The Torcellan was brilliant; anyone could see that. He listened to Lotar’s theories and offered his own, enjoying nothing more than coming up with strategies and far-reaching plans.

  When they’d received word that the fleet was coming out of FTL near Waler’s Star, they had walked onto the bridge together. As Lotar made for his desk, Koel had said carelessly, “No, I’ll need you with me during the battle.”

  Lotar was rising fast, and nothing had ever felt more satisfying in his life. Let the rest of them eat their hearts out. They’d tormented him for being the newbie and not knowing the ropes, for being too cautious, and making his reports too detailed.