A sudden brief memory flashed and was gone, leaving a sweet aftertaste of walking down that ramp with Ben for the first time and him calling her Mrs. Bemjin, teasing her about her inability to get going again after cryo. A false memory. Or at least, she had walked down the ramp with Benjamin, but her perception was still skewed by the conditioning Mrs. McLellan had put in place to enable her to carry out this assignment. She could never have fooled Benjamin if she hadn’t believed it herself.
“It’s time,” Ari said. “The only way you can free yourself.”
A groundcar pulled up. Two mercs prodded Ben Benjamin and Ronan Wolfe out of the back, arms shackled behind them. Another two mercs formed up to either side. Wolfe looked exhausted, but Benjamin looked ill. The shoulder of his buddysuit was charred as if from a bolt gun.
Her head spins, and she’s briefly in another place.
She’s running across the compound, explosions all around. Ben and Ronan are with her. They have to get away. She drops and twists, taking out the nearest guard with a clean shot. She doesn’t even have time to think that it’s a human being she’s killed. He would have done the same to her if he’d had the chance. As she comes to her feet, she brings her gun up level and aims it directly at Craike.
Ben comes out of a roll at an awkward angle, but he lands upright, perfectly balanced. He’s good! Her appreciation of Ben turns on itself as he trains his gun on a white buddysuited man. Ari! Ari in danger.
She waivers. Craike fires off two bolts with frightening precision. Ben leaps for her, their bodies connecting, going down in a tangle of arms and legs. His weight drives all the air out of her body, knocks her gun flying. She hears the bolt gun crack twice, smells the burning air, burning flesh. Ben goes limp on top of her.
She snapped back into the present.
Between them, the four guards forced Ben and Ronan to their knees about two meters apart.
“Kill them, Cara. Benjamin first.” Ari nodded and stepped back. The guard on her left handed her his knife. It was meant for business, a slim eighteen-centimeter blade, carbon black, frictionless. The handle was molded to fit his hand, but even though her hand was smaller, it felt well balanced with a nice heft to it. A good killing knife.
*You can do this.* Donida McLellan was in her head. *You need to do this. You need closure. Up close and personal. Knife across the throat. The bastard will never grin at you again as he’s inside your body, taking what’s yours.*
“Ben?”
“Hey, Cara. How are you?” His voice was low, easy. He looked at her eyes, not at the knife. He wasn’t grinning now, but there was something in his eyes. Concern, maybe.
She sees him smiling down at her. They are in bed and her body is still singing. He leans over and blows a raspberry on her belly button. She pulls his head down into her breasts, but they aren’t big enough to suffocate him in, so they both dissolve into easy laughter. What would the psi-techs think of their commander if they saw him now, hair loose, completely relaxed? They’d probably think that he was a very nice guy. She used to think that nice was a mediocre adjective, but Ben doesn’t have a mean bone in his body.
She puzzled, searching for the reason she had to hate him. She remembered their first time.
She’s sleeping with him to worm her way into his affections. She’s lying in a bed in a room in the visitor center on Mirrimar-14. She’s thinking of Ari, and she mustn’t or she won’t be able to go through with this.
Benjamin reaches across to pull the sheet up, his hand brushing against her breast. She flinches before she can stop herself.
“Did I hurt you?” His voice is full of concern.
“No. You were wonderful.”
She tries to make him feel good, but she’s not sure he’s buying it.
It wasn’t good sex, but it wasn’t rape. In fact, didn’t she instigate it? She faltered and turned to look at Ari, standing about twenty meters away as if he didn’t trust her with a knife in her hand. Mrs. McLellan was standing beside him. Where was Craike?
Craike with a crater blown in his head. The stink of burned flesh and singed hair. Ari kissing Craike’s bloody lips.
She took a deep breath and felt a sharp stab in her ribs. She put her left hand up to the sudden pain and felt a discomfort between her first and second fingers. That was a bloody silly place to wedge a stone. She looked down. There was no stone there, just a memory of one.
Oh, fuck! She breathed out and looked at Ben again. She could see the pain lines etched into his face from the burn on his shoulder, but Ronan must have done a good job because he was awake, upright, and holding his pain in.
“I’m fine, now,” she murmured, not daring to risk mind-to-mind contact with Ben. Donida McLellan was too close. “How are you?”
“I’ve been better.” Despite everything, his eyes held a smile that was just for her. “But I’ll hold together for a while longer.”
She raised the knife, holding it lightly in her right hand. “I’m supposed to use this.”
“I know. Do it quickly if you’re going to.”
“I killed Craike. He’s not going to let me live.”
*Finish him!* Donida McLellan was in her mind again. She felt her grip on the knife tighten, and she took a pace forward involuntarily.
Ben’s eyes narrowed.
A tiny explosion of dust at her feet drew her attention. A sapper bot, barely three centimeters long erupted from the pounded earth, crossed the short distance between her and Ben, and disappeared behind him. She didn’t dare let her eyes follow it.
*Kill him. Take the knife, cross over, stand behind him. Left hand under chin, swipe the blade across his throat in one clean movement. Watch the blood spray over the ground. Let him fall forward, choking out his life. Feel immense satisfaction. Justice at last. Right the wrongs. Do it!*
Cara felt her right foot take a step forward all by itself. She glanced back to where Ari and Donida McLellan stood together. McLellan had one hand out. Ari was supporting her. Supporting her! Getting inside Cara’s head and staying there was obviously taking its toll.
McLellan wasn’t invincible.
A light switched on in Cara’s head. McLellan had taught her some hard lessons, but she’d always been a good student.
See how the abused learns to abuse! She wasn’t sure whether she sent that thought at McLellan or whether it was purely for herself. She turned back to Ben. Locked eyes with him, felt energy flow, felt Ronan in the mix. She expanded to take in Ronan’s strength as well and then seized McLellan’s last thought and turned it back toward her.
She’s in a corridor and there’s a door with a small clear panel in it.
Place: Sentier-4.
She peers through the window and sees a bank of machines; a padded chair with a movement restraint and there’s someone standing beside it. A woman, thin and dark.
Name: Donida McLellan.
She takes the woman, grasps her by the shoulders, turns her around, and stares into her eyes. The woman stares back, supremely confident. Then her confidence wavers. Cara hisses, “It was you who raped me, you bastard. You and Ari van Blaiden. You. Will. Pay. Both of you.”
She forces the woman backward into the chair. She stares her down. Implants meshing. She gives her nowhere to hide. See how you like it, Mrs. McLellan! You’ve taken your last victim. She goes deep into the woman’s head, finds the source of her power, the core of her implant and . . . switches it off.
She backs away, leaving the woman in the chair, head lolling to one side, a thin trickle of drool coming from one corner of her slack mouth. She turns and runs toward the light; running blindly, stumbling forward.
Someone catches her.
Ben.
McLellan dropped to her knees, scrabbling at Ari’s arm. He stepped back, shaking her off like a street beggar, his face a mask of surprise and revulsion. She didn’t even look human anymore.
Cara was free of McLellan at last. Reality crystallized. She’d been on the run. There had never been
a deep-cover mission. They’d needed her information, and Ari had been playing games for his own amusement. Maybe for revenge. Who could tell what went on inside Ari’s head. The man was a menace. A dangerous menace.
And unless she did something about it right now, they’d never be able to touch him for all his crimes. He’d have his mercs kill Ben and Ronan, kill her and probably Lorient as well, and he’d waltz home to Alphacorp with a platinum planet in the bag. Fireproof. Unless . . .
She had the knife. Ari was twenty or thirty paces away at a dead run, preoccupied with an insensate McLellan. Of the half dozen guards, only two were close enough to give her any trouble physically, though they might all be dead shots. She had to try . . .
An echo of: protect Ari at all costs, flicked through her brain, and she squashed it.
She turned.
*Don’t.* Ben was inside her head.
*This is the only chance.*
*I know.* Ben powered up from his knees, his hands freed now by Archie’s bot. He barreled into her, snatching the knife from her grip and throwing it underhand in one smooth move.
As she crashed to the floor, Ben’s arms around her protectively, the world turned upside down and she saw Ari frozen for an instant with a look of surprise on his handsome, cruel face, the hilt of the knife protruding from his right eye. Then his knees buckled, and he collapsed to the ground, twitched horribly, and lay still.
She heard shouting and an explosion rocked the compound. Ben pulled her head in close to his chest and another heavy weight landed on the other side of her. Ronan.
A second explosion and a third. Then the sound of craft screaming overhead, people running, utter confusion. The three of them huddled together while the world went mad.
She didn’t know how long it was before the dust cleared and Ronan rolled sideways. Ben took a moment or two longer before he relinquished his hold on her. By the time they’d pulled themselves together and Cara had managed to stand upright, cursing her rib, the first of the ships from Crossways was already down on the landing pad and van Blaiden’s mercs had surrendered. Ari himself was tumbled like a discarded toy among the debris while Donida McLellan still scrabbled at his corpse pathetically, fingers hooked into talons, eyes locked in a thousand-meter stare.
Two black-suited soldiers picked up the shrieking McLellan between them and carried her away. Cara stared at Ari and the knife horrifically protruding from his skull. She felt her gorge rising and turned quickly to Ben, standing quietly behind her, his face gray with exhaustion and pain.
“How do you feel?” Ben asked.
“About Ari? Ask me this time next year. Anyway, I should be asking you that. How’s the shoulder?”
“Holding for now.”
She heard the tension in his voice and knew he was lying, but he didn’t give her time to be solicitous. They walked toward where Mother Ramona and a man she presumed was Norton Garrick stood by their cruiser, attended by a small squad of personal guards. Behind them, Gen and Max emerged from the Solar Wind, hand in hand, grinning and waving.
“Where are Wenna and Lorient?” Cara asked.
“Ronan’s gone to free them. Van Blaiden had them both dumped back in the ore carrier,” Ben said. “Lorient was supposed to contemplate the benefits of signing the contract.”
“He didn’t sign?”
“Said you told him not to.”
“I did?” She shook her head. “I can’t have been as far gone as I thought, not all of the time anyway.”
“You’ve always been a lot stronger than you give yourself credit for.”
“I’m not sure about that. I feel as though I’ve been holding onto the edge of sanity with my fingernails.”
“You held on, and you didn’t let go, and I love you for it, Mrs. Bemjin.”
“Oh . . .” She stopped in mid-stride.
“What is it?”
“I’m not.”
“What?”
“Mrs. Bemjin.”
“Does it matter?”
She relaxed and smiled.
Then they were shaking hands with Mother Ramona and Garrick. She was hugging Gen and Max. Everyone was asking questions at once and trying to answer them at the same time. Archie Tatum was walking across the compound toward them, still lugging a crate of bots and . . . it was all too much. Cara’s side hurt like fury and her knees felt wobbly. She still wasn’t sure if she was going to throw up, and all she really wanted to do was lie down and close her eyes.
She grabbed Ben’s hand. “Can we get out of here?”
He squeezed her fingers and nodded toward the Solar Wind, still standing with her ramp down. “Look at that.” He grinned. “Gen didn’t break my shiny new toy.”
“Are you sure? Should we go and check?”
“Let’s do that.”
She forgot to let go of his hand as they walked toward the Solar Wind. Together.
Empire of Dust Page 55