by Natalie Grey
“What’s your story?” She looked interested.
“Yours first.”
She laughed at that. “Now, that just makes me curious.” A look sized him up. “You worked for your living,” she guessed. “Not on a station, you don’t have the look. On a planet, a habitable one. You’ve got dust on your bag, and your nails aren’t black at the edges. I’d say a farmer, yes?”
Liam swallowed and said nothing.
“Try me.” When he said nothing, she raised her eyebrows. “You should learn to read people like that, you know, if you want to be a Dragon. Best practice.”
Liam looked at the gun. He looked at her skin. Pale, and not burned. Older, but without weathered skin. She’d been inside, then. On a station, or a ship—or one of the non-habitable planets that kept their populations in domes? Hard to say yet, but the question led him to examine her boots: fairly thin-soled, with a synthetic tread that looked like it meant business. It didn’t look like they were meant for distance, though.
And she was clearly trained with weapons, as well as sizing people up.
“A spy?” Liam guessed.
“Because?”
“You know how to size people up, you know weapons, and you look like you travel on ships.”
She laughed, but it was not mean-spirited. “Somewhat correct. I ran security for some of the big haulers going out past New Arizona. That meant getting to know the routes and the people who liked to wait there. Learned all about them, learned how they fought. Lot more of ‘em like to board the ships than you’d think, and unless you’re looking for ‘em, you’ll never know they were there—they dock, all quiet-like, and they either take goods and go, or you wind up with a gun to your head. Provides a nice incentive to know your business.” She smiled at Liam’s wide-eyed look. “And, kiddo—everyone needs to know how to read people.“
Liam looked around. “Are all of these people like you?”
“Yes and no. Every Dragon team needs something different. There are spies here, real spies. Marines, merchants—hell, probably a few postal workers. They get very intense about making sure mail goes to the right place, let me tell you.”
She was trying to make him laugh, but all Liam could feel was a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. “I don’t know any of the things you know.”
“Knowing things can be useful. Like I said, kept me alive more than once. But knowing things isn’t worth shit if you can’t act on it. You’ll learn.”
“How long am I going to get to learn? I’m going to get my ass handed to me.”
“If you keep treating it like a fair fight, you are.” She raised her eyebrows. “But a smart person never starts into a fair fight—and Dragons are very smart. So, even though you haven’t asked for my advice, I’d mull that over. Everyone here is the best, and that means no one can rest on their laurels. If you thought this was going to be easy, farm boy, you came to the wrong place.” She grinned. “Also? I’ll bet you’re thinking they believed your paperwork, huh? What’d you say you were, 19? 20?”
Liam froze.
“No one’s gonna believe that.” She clicked the last piece of the rifle into place and checked the sight. “But that’s my point: if you pull your weight, no one cares, either.”
For the first time, Liam wondered if he might have a shot here. He reached his hand out.
“Liam Morel.”
She clasped it. “Victoria Swift. Welcome to Selection, Morel. I’m looking forward to seeing what you can do.”
“So.” Lesedi settled back in her chair and laced her fingers together. “Tell me why you’re here.” She nodded to the young man sitting with Nyx. “Also, I don’t think I know that one.”
“Mars,” Talon told her.
He watched her look Mars up and down. The man flushed. Most people did, when Lesedi looked at them. She had a way of looking that suggested she saw everything, including what you’d eaten for breakfast and the search history on your computer. Talon liked watching her size people up.
“God of war, eh?” Lesedi’s voice was intrigued. She was intrigued by everything, Talon had learned. “Or a candy bar. Less likely, but knowing Talon and his nicknames, not impossible.” Her lips twitched again at the deer-in-the-headlights look Mars was wearing, and she turned back to Talon. “So. Tell me.”
“I want to kill the Warlord of Ymir,” Talon told her.
“Everyone knows that, my dear.” She held out a hand. “Let me see the mission brief.”
Mars made a strangled sort of noise, and shut up hastily when Talon and Nyx gave him a look.
“There’s no mission brief.” Talon tried to make himself comfortable, and settled for leaning his elbows on his knees. There wasn’t much of a way to sit comfortably in a normally-sized chair, while wearing armor.
And a Dragon didn’t go to Akintola station without armor.
Lesedi narrowed her eyes slightly. “Too classified?”
“No. Let’s say I’ve gotten tired of waiting for Intelligence to decide it’s a good time.”
Lesedi went utterly still for a moment. Her eyes went to Nyx, who stared back blandly, and Mars, who still looked overwhelmed by what was going on. She sank deep into thought a moment later, resting her chin on her intertwined hands, tapping her bottom lip with one slim finger.
“So you want to know … what, exactly? And don’t say, ‘whatever you need to know.’”
“I’ve done my homework, if that’s what you want.”
“I want you to be clear on what you’re hoping for … and what answers you’re expecting.” She leaned forward, elegant and hard-edged all at once. “Talon, you think you’re the first one to want to know about him? Why do you think no one knows his past?”
“The easiest explanation is he’s a nobody,” Talon murmured. “You want to know if I’ve thought about it? I’ve thought. Although, him being a nobody….” He shook his head. “It doesn’t fit, does it?”
“Anything could fit. The man you’re dealing with is an anomaly in every sense of the word. Yes, it makes sense that he was born on an outer world, that his DNA isn’t tagged anywhere, that his contacts might not remember him. I follow your train of thought—I’ve had the same questions. But how does a nobody rise high enough to get 50,000 troops … and pay them enough that they still haven’t said who hired them, all those years later? Fifty thousand loose ends is a lot of loose ends, wouldn’t you say?”
“So we find his friends.”
“That’s exactly what you do not want to do. Talon, be careful who you trust with this. He has powerful friends. Weapons dealers. Mining syndicates. He’s the linchpin of a great deal of trade—and although you haven’t asked me, I’ll hazard a guess that the ores from Ymir are part of the reason that the Alliance hasn’t taken him down.”
“If we went there, we’d kill civilians in any attack that could take him down.”
“You think the slavery they live in is so much better?”
“I don’t. I’m just telling you why we haven’t gone.”
“Or you’re telling me why you think they haven’t ordered a full-scale invasion. And you’re being very generous with your estimation of their motives.”
“That’s not fair and you know it.” Talon could feel the pulse beating in his throat. “They sent a carrier. They lost it. They’re trying to find a good way.”
Lesedi said nothing. She never parroted back comforting platitudes when you wanted her to, Talon was learning.
“Are you sure you want my answers?” She raised her eyebrows. “Because I’ll look, but there are two promises I will not make you: first, I will not promise you that I’ll be able to find the answer. I haven’t yet, and believe me, I’ve looked. Second, I will not promise you that I will shield you from the truth.”
“I never asked you to.”
“Mmm, but you don’t know it yet, and the truth has a way of making people wish they didn’t know it.” She gave a shrug. “But name the question, Talon, and I’ll do what I can to find y
ou the answer.”
“Fine.” Talon smiled. “Who is the Warlord of Ymir?” He stood up. “I’m going to Seneca. I’ll be back after, to see what you’ve found.”
“Seneca? Asking for leave to go Warlord-hunting?”
“More like, giving them a heads up.” Talon smiled tightly. “I’m done asking permission. He has millions in those mines. They can’t afford to wait for Intelligence to decide the Navy has good odds.” He waved Nyx and Mars out of Lesedi’s office ahead of him. “Oh, and….” Talon reached into a pocket of his armor and drew out the briefs from the last mission. He dropped them on her desk. “Too late now, but I’d be interested to see what you make of those.”
Chapter Six
Halting steps sounded in the tunnel nearby, and Samara looked up in interest. She nodded when Stefan came around the corner, and watched in sympathy as he dropped onto one of the benches with a groan.
“Bad shift?” She, on the one day of 12 she was given off, had been cleaning and stacking the pitifully small stockpile of weapons they had.
“They increased quota again.” He wiped a hand over his brow, leaving a smear of black dust.
He stared up at the ceiling, and Samara recognized his expression all too well. It was the one she wore after the most brutal shifts, when the managers had been freer than normal with their batons, when the rickety infrastructure had taken limbs or lives.
It was the expression that said she was not going to let this break her. The Warlord wanted them too tired to do anything but fall into bed, and certainly too tired to fight in the resistance.
Too many times, it worked. Samara had watched countless friends and family whisper about joining the resistance, only to have the fire in their eyes fade to desperation, and from there to exhaustion.
It frightened her that someday she, too, might lose the will to fight.
“Where’s Arlon?” Stefan was still staring at the ceiling. “Shouldn’t he be helping you?”
“We fought,” Samara said shortly.
“What?” Stefan sat up quickly. “What happened?”
“It’s not important.” The last gun clattered as she put it on the pile harder than she needed to.
47 guns. If that weren’t what they were hinging their fight on, it would be genuinely funny. It was fucking hysterical that they were trying to take on a man with unlimited mercenaries … with 47 guns.
Especially when calling them guns was being generous with the word. The truth was, some of them would be better used as blunt objects.
“Samara. What’s going on?” Stefan sat up and made to haul himself out of his chair.
“Don’t get up. Rest.” Samara went to get him some water and rations from the cabinet in the corner.
“Do we have food to spare?” He looked worried as she came back with it, but she could see him physically holding himself back from snatching the food out of her hands.
“We have to use the resources we’ve got today, or we might not make it to tomorrow,” Samara said practically. She pressed the rations into his hand. “An empty storage locker and strong fighters are worth more to us than rations in the locker and our fighters too weak to hold a gun, right?”
He nodded jerkily. He was still holding the ration in an open hand, as if the restraint it took him to hold back was one of the only things keeping him from collapse.
“Eat,” Samara said.
She turned away and stacked the guns more neatly while he ate, so that he wouldn’t feel like he had to be dignified about it. She heard him gulp the water and give a sigh of exhaustion.
“So, what’s this about a fight with Arlon?”
Samara paused. “We need more weapons.”
“And?”
“He forbid it.”
“He forbid it? We do need more weapons.”
“I wanted to try to contact some of the trafficking syndicates off-world.” Samara looked over at him.
She hoped against hope he would say that she was right, that off-world was where they needed to go. She hoped he would say that he had also been thinking about it, and that he’d come to the same conclusion: it was clear that they couldn’t scrounge enough scraps from the Warlord’s guard to mount an effective campaign.
Instead, he asked: “What did Jacinta say? Had you asked her about this?”
Samara tensed. This was what Arlon had asked, too. “She said it was too risky.”
“Ah.” He stared at her, the single syllable hanging between them.
Jacinta was careful. And now she’s dead, and we’re what’s left. But Samara did not say that. She bit her lip almost until it bled, and she reminded herself that Jacinta had trusted Arlon more than any of them.
“I’m sure we’ll figure something out.” She had to force herself to say the words.
“Ah,” Stefan said again, and it was a carefully neutral sound.
Samara stared around the cave, willing there to be some other chore for her to do.
There wasn’t. She went and sat near Stefan, and folded her hands neatly between her knees.
“Have you heard from Aryn?” Stefan asked suddenly.
Samara tensed. This was, if possible, the one thing she wanted to discuss even less than Arlon’s recalcitrance. It was two years since she had last seen Aryn Beranek, as her friend left Ymir for a life of luxury beyond their wildest dreams.
Aryn had had a chance to escape, and Samara had never once doubted that she did the right thing when she encouraged Aryn to go.
It was just that most of her heart had left with her. It turned out it was pretty easy to keep to the ‘no spouse and kids’ rule the resistance had, when the person you were madly in love with was gone forever.
Thinking about Aryn was like pressing on a bruise. Samara’s hands clenched. Whether anyone had known they were lovers, she was not sure. It would have been strictly forbidden, of course.
It probably didn’t matter now, but she didn’t want Stefan’s pity.
“Haven’t talked to her in a while,” she said shortly.
“Maybe she could—”
“No,” Samara said. Just one word. Sending Aryn away had been the hardest thing she had ever done, but the woman was safe now. Samara wasn’t going to draw her back to Ymir, not for anything. She had joined the resistance to protect the people she loved. “We’ll find another way.” She swallowed. “Arlon will find another way,” she corrected herself.
“Ah,” Stefan said again.
Two hours of sparring, one very questionable dinner from Akintola station, and a gigantic stack of paperwork later, Talon still could not settle enough to sleep. He hadn’t been able to relax since they turned toward Seneca.
He should be able to. He’d made a decision that had clearly been coming down the pipeline for a while. He would have guessed he’d be calm, if anything. He had finally realized that he couldn’t live with waiting for an opening. He would make one on his own.
But he wasn’t calm. He was keyed up. He was already exhausted by the conversation with the head of Intelligence, and he hadn’t even had it yet.
There was a knock at his door, and Talon looked over.
“Come.”
He had guessed it would be Tersi, wondering why Talon had started doing paperwork all of a sudden, but instead it was Nyx.
“Can I come in?”
“Sure.” Talon gestured for her to sit on the bed. The captain’s quarters were nice, but there still wasn’t enough room for two chairs. Dragon ships were fast and sleek, and all of the spare room went to an armory and training grounds.
She hovered instead of sitting, however, leaning against the wall and crossing her arms.
Talon rarely saw Nyx upset. She was a calming force on the ship, where she had a way of untangling budding disputes between team members, and in combat, where she seemed to make sense of the chaos.
It had taken him the better part of a year to realize that when she got especially quiet, she was worried. But now he knew, and seeing her like this put him on
alert.
“Problem?”
She looked surprised for a moment. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”
Talon leaned back in his chair and tilted his head at her curiously.
“What you said to Lesedi.” She lifted her shoulders. “What she said to you, too. Everything about that, really. Wanted to see where your head was at.”
Talon considered this. “What, exactly, about what I said to Lesedi?”
“‘Any attempt to take Ymir would take civilian lives.’” Her eyes were watchful as she quoted him.
“You heard me say that I knew it was what they thought, right?”
“There was a time you wouldn’t even have brought it up.” She didn’t stop when he opened his mouth. “No, you wouldn’t have, and you know it. You would have said there was no good reason to hold back, and they were a bunch of spineless idiots.”
“They are a bunch of spineless idiots.”
“I’m not disagreeing.” Her teeth flashed in a smile. “I’m saying, the thought that comes to your mind first in all of this is the cost on civilians during the op. That’s new.”
Talon’s fingers clenched involuntarily around the arms of the chair. He was suddenly quite sure that he didn’t want to know where this was going. There was a sense of danger about it, that something about him had shifted while he wasn’t watching. He had the feeling that he wasn’t going to like finding out about it when Nyx laid it out in plain words.
She had noticed his sudden tension and now she did sit, considering her words carefully.
“The Blood Moon,” she said finally.
Talon swallowed. The Blood Moon was the name of the slaving ship they had taken down all those years ago. It was the mission that had made Talon’s name as a Dragon commander, worthy of the reputation Team 9 had possessed even before he was a part of it.
It was also the first mission where he’d lost a Dragon on his team, not because they had died in combat, but because what they had done had broken their spirit. Cade Williams had been one of the most honorable soldiers Talon had ever met, and when he left….