by Jenn Burke
“The AEF has nothing more to learn from her.”
“But they can learn from you?”
Everything in Zed wanted him to run, but he couldn’t. They had him well and truly cornered. “Yes,” he said shakily.
More moments of silence.
“You should also know I coerced Ryan Scott.” Might as well try to mitigate as much damage as possible.
“You coerced him. From your cell.”
“Yes.”
“You want to go there?”
“It’s the truth.”
“Is that the sort of truth I can expect from you if I agree to this deal?”
Fuck. Zed threaded his fingers through his hair and tugged, a gesture he’d picked up from Flick. The stinging in his scalp helped to ground him. “He’s an old, old friend, General.”
“I know. I’ll admit, we let that opportunity happen when it shouldn’t have. I’ll see what I can do. No promises.” Bradley huffed. “I’m agreeing to your conditions, Anatolius.” A pause and a beep indicated Bradley had widened the comm channel. “Fighter Squadron Tengu, be advised that Shuttle Delta-Sigma-One has permission to dock temporarily with the Chaos, once it arrives. Docking time will not exceed fifteen minutes. Monitor life signs. One will leave the shuttle. If the second leaves, open fire at the Chaos. If the shuttle deviates from these instructions at any time, open fire at the Chaos.”
“Tengu Squadron Commander. Acknowledged.”
Zed muted the AEF channel again and folded forward until his forehead brushed the shuttle’s console. So close. So fucking close. At least Kinley wouldn’t live out the end of her life surrounded by nothing. She’d have the Chaos crew. Dieter, if Dieter was in any shape to care. Friends.
He could salvage part of his promise to her and their teammates. That’s what mattered.
* * *
Felix yelled as Elias wrestled him away from the comm array for the umpteenth time. “Let me talk to them!”
“You can’t, Flick.” Anger gave Marnie’s voice an unaccustomed edge. “There are six Raijin class fighters out there. You know why they’re called that, right? Thunder and lightning!” The AEF’s fighters were all named after Japanese deities, and Raijin-class fighters were the best of the fleet. “If we even twitch in the wrong direction, they’re going to kill us all.” Her lips trembled and Felix fought the wave of compassion surging through him. The AEF would not stop with scouring them from space. General Bradley had Ryan. He hadn’t outright said it, but Zed’s half of the conversation clearly indicated as much.
“Five minutes until intercept.” Qek’s quiet voice was a shock, a slap.
“We came all this way!” His voice rose on a whine. “I came...” back. He’d come back. And it was too late.
“This isn’t the end of it. The AEF was willing to negotiate, that means they want Zed alive.”
Another cry rose within, one he squashed before it could mangle his throat. His whole body wailed with internal refrain: it’s not fair!
God, when would he accept that life wasn’t fucking fair? How many times did he have to be front and center for yet another demonstration of just how unfair shit could be? And he couldn’t even take comfort in the fact that his misery currently had such good company because he felt Marnie’s pain too. Her anguish and her barely concealed anger. He’d never seen her so human and he didn’t want to say it didn’t suit her.
“Four minutes,” Qek intoned.
Elias hooked a hand around Felix’s shoulder. “Let’s get to Cargo Two.”
Mind whirling, Felix followed. He formed plans, examined them from multiple angles for workability and lunacy. This couldn’t be it. This could not be the end of the road.
Joining Zed aboard the shuttle would accomplish nothing except his own incarceration. Or death—he wasn’t as useful as the super soldier. He didn’t have time to jigger some sort of signal, to fiddle with the shuttle’s life support, put in a false signature. Did he have anything in Cargo Two that could replicate the bulk and temperature of a human being?
It had taken him hours to retool the shields, he couldn’t just lay them on a new vessel, nor could he extend them. As for the Chaos, the upgraded shields might have rendered them invisible, or less visible, but the Cambridge currently had a fix on them. If he did haul Zed aboard, they couldn’t maneuver fast enough to get away without being traced. And their shields, visible or not, couldn’t withstand more than a single shot from anything out there. Any collision with a pebble would tear a hole in their hull soon after.
By the time they reached Cargo Two, Qek’s countdown had hit two minutes. Nausea cramped Felix’s belly. He leaned his shoulder against the wall and shut his eyes, sure he was going to throw up or pass out or both. The dual sensation was not unlike what he’d experienced going into combat. Fear, exhilaration, formless rage boiling up between.
He’d always been too emotional to be a soldier. Why hadn’t anyone ever seen that?
“One minute.”
The Chaos shuddered as they made contact. Felix opened his eyes and listened to the faint thump of the airlocks latching together. Nessa and Marnie arrived with a hover float and med kit between them. Light danced along the panel beside the auxiliary hatch, drawing his gaze. The LEDs blinked in sequence, back and forth, back and...locked. The airlock began cycling. Felix held his breath.
Only Elias’s hold on his shoulder kept him back as the door slid open to reveal two figures dappled with emergency lighting. The shuttle had taken heavy damage from the AEF’s warning shot. The larger of the two figures was obviously Zed. He pulled Kinley over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.
“If I set foot in the docking tube, they’ll open fire,” he said.
Elias let go of Felix and together they moved forward. Elias pushed through the hatch first, into the short docking tube. Zed hefted the unconscious form of Kinley Webb onto his shoulder, then stepped back.
“You okay?” Elias asked.
“Peachy,” Zed replied. He looked anything but. Filthy and worn, with the posture of a man who had pushed for days without proper rest. He’d lost his shirt, if he’d ever had one, and his torso was a mess of grime and dark abrasions. A gray bandage was wrapped around his left foot.
Did I do this to him? Felix made a sound, something nonverbal.
Zed’s gaze cut sideways as Felix elbowed his way into the narrow space beside them. “Flick,” he said, his voice full of pain and resignation.
“Zed.” What else could he say?
Zed edged back along the tube. “I gotta go.”
“Don’t go.” Felix reached for him. “Zed...please don’t go.” He was breaking, again. He could feel it. Pieces of himself flying away, swirling up like dust, leaving him thin and weak. Insubstantial. “Please...no.”
“I have to.”
Felix took another step forward. “I’ll come with you!”
“You can’t.”
“Let me go instead!”
“You can’t.”
They were stupid ideas, as formless as the dust of his being. Felix leaped forward anyway, reaching for Zed, desperate to touch him. “I’m sorry, Zed. I’m sorry.”
Zed’s warm hand gripped his. “Don’t be.”
“Please...” He swallowed the rest of it. He had to let go. He had to let Zed go. But not without knowing. “I love you.”
A brief smile shifted Zed’s mouth. It pained him to smile, Felix could see that. But he tried it and succeeded for a moment. “I know.”
Zed let go and stepped back, palming the door panel. It hissed closed. Felix resisted the urge to fall against it, pound with his fists until he bruised his flesh beyond repair, broke his bones. He stood there, trembling from stem to stern, his rage no longer formless. The howl inside deafened him to the voices behind, but he knew what they were saying. He had to step b
ack, he had to exit the tube. He had to leave Zed as Zed had left him. Again.
With a monumental effort, he stepped back. Once, and again. He all but tumbled out of the tube and reached up to smack the panel. The door slid closed and the lights blinked in reverse order.
“Fix?”
He shook his head. Speech would be impossible until he quieted the urge to scream his throat raw. No one touched him, for which he was thankful. Instead, they turned their attention to Kinley, supine on the float, and conversed in quiet tones.
Qek’s voice piped through general comms. “We are disengaged.”
“Let’s make tracks,” Elias said.
“Where to, Captain?”
The voices in Felix’s head calmed, formed a simple sequence. “Thunder and lightning.”
“What was that?” Elias asked.
Felix turned to him, took a breath, said it again. “Thunder and lightning.”
The tilt of Elias’s head pretty much said he thought Felix had left any address known as sanity.
Felix raised his voice. “Set a course for Mars, Qek.”
“Mars?” Elias breathed. “Are you going to appeal to Central?”
Felix shook his head. “Think bigger. Think much bigger.”
Chapter Seventeen
Four mouths dropped open, surprise catching everyone gathered in the mess, regardless of species.
Elias recovered first. Shaking his head, he said, “No.”
“There has to be another way,” Nessa added.
Marnie maintained her stunned expression.
Qek clicked thoughtfully. “I like the thunder and lightning analogy, but I am not sure the Guardians would approve.”
“You think?” Nessa looked as if she might reach for a hypo-syringe.
“This all we have left!” Felix ground his teeth. “You know the AEF is never going to let him go.”
Marnie’s lips met one another with a quiet smacking sound and parted again. “And you think the answer is to deliberately antagonize the Guardians.”
“The stin. We antagonize the stin and hope the Guardians step in. They’re the peacekeepers of the galaxy. We’ve seen them arresting a stin ship in human territory before. So, we go to the Hub and fly into stin territory.”
“You’re insane.”
“Quite probably. But do you have a better idea? Got a direct line to the Guardians in your bag of Intelligence tricks?”
“No. So far as I know, no one has a direct line to the Guardians.”
One man did. Could Zed use his bracelet to contact the Guardians? Somehow, it had connected him to Ryan. What was the range? Were the Guardians already aware the AEF had their proof?
“Let’s set a course for the Hub, then.” Felix gestured toward the port side of the ship to where the gate to the Hub pooled in space. They couldn’t see it at that moment, but it was there, a benevolent eye focused on Mars. A one-way ticket to the center of the galaxy.
“Wait, slow down.” Marnie waved her hand over the table top. “Why the Guardians? What interest do they have in Zed?”
“Think it through a minute, Marnie. The end of the war, Zed’s lack of...death. His current state of health.”
She didn’t deliberate for long. “The Guardians fixed him. Holy shit.”
“They helped him once. Maybe they’ll help him again.”
Marnie took a little longer to consider that, and she wasn’t the only one. The whole crew observed the pause, each obviously weighing the burden of Felix’s plan.
Qek broke the silence. “A course to the Hub?”
No one produced any further objections, and Qek departed for the bridge.
“I’d better go get Kinley strapped down.” Nessa trotted toward the med bay.
Marnie followed. “I’ll give you a hand.”
“‘Holy shit’ is underselling this plan.” Elias scrubbed his palm over the top of his close-cropped scalp. Felix waited for him to call the crew back to the mess, urge them to reconsider. Instead, he said, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Felix didn’t dare tell him otherwise.
* * *
Zed inhaled a shaky breath as his little craft set down back where he’d started, on one of the shuttle docks of the Cambridge. Unlike his departure, dozens of people milled about on the deck—no few of which were fully armed marines, their stiff postures radiating either discomfort with confronting a war hero, or an eagerness for action. Maybe a bit of both.
He pushed himself up, laying a hand on the shuttle’s console for balance. His legs were less than steady, but he refused to walk out among the enemy with anything less than firm, sure steps. Closing his eyes, he sought his meditation space—only to have it interrupted by amplified orders reverberating through the shuttle’s walls.
Yeah, yeah. He walked to the shuttle door and triggered the seal. It hissed open, the sound accompanied by the click of a dozen rifles being prepared for whatever Zed planned for resistance.
He hadn’t planned anything. If he’d been healthy, if he’d been sure the Chaos was out of range of the Cambridge, he might have Zoned and phase-shifted, showing the soldiers the benefits of the AEF’s special training. As it was, the total sum of his resistance was a grimace and a glare as he stepped down the shuttle’s steps.
“Hands where we can see them, Major!” someone shouted at him.
He held up his hands, middle fingers extended.
Bradley stepped out of the crowd, Preston beside him. Fuck, not good. Zed froze at the bottom of the shuttle stairs. He’d known this was what he faced, but willingly walking toward that woman was more than his exhausted, battered body was prepared to do.
The soldiers’ commander barked an order, and before Zed could react, four raced forward to secure him. Cuffs were snapped on his wrists behind his back, then fastened to a belt looped around his waist to limit the movement of his arms.
Then, only then, did Preston step forward. She brandished a hypo-syringe the way a warrior of old might wield a sword. “Just a tranq,” she promised. “Can’t have you causing any more trouble or trying to escape those cuffs.”
He tried to jerk away but the soldiers held him still. Preston pressed the syringe to his neck and glanced up at him—the gleam of amusement in her eyes told him she’d lied, right before he felt the familiar, sickening burn of poison in his veins. He stumbled under the onslaught, reawakening the pain in his foot, pain the poison stoked higher. Higher.
Not again. Please.
“Motherfucker!” He jerked sideways, trying to get to Preston. Behind his back, fingers tightened into claws—nails spearing into the same talons as the stin. Giant, sharp claws.
No—hallucination.
The thought had no weight, not when he could feel the claws cutting into his skin. He would tear apart the cuffs. He would rip through everyone who stood between him and the good fucking doctor. He strained against the restraints. Felt them give. He roared, the sound like a lion in the small space. No, he was a lion. He’d rip her to shreds, he’d rip them all to shreds, every last one—
“Jesus Christ,” someone muttered.
Zed barely saw the rifle butt that slammed into his forehead.
* * *
Felix swallowed over the queasy feeling in his gut. The quick journey through the pair of gates connecting Sol to Tau Centauri, also known as the Hub, or the center of the galaxy as determined by the Guardians, always unsettled him. His mind couldn’t cope with popping between stars in as little as three seconds. Or maybe it was the three-second halt in reality that bothered him so much.
Beside him, Qek caressed the pilot’s console, her long blue fingers moving across the display in a coordinated ballet. She clicked contentedly and turned to Felix. “Smooth sailing.”
Felix offe
red a faint smile in return. “The calm before the storm.” Or the eye of the hurricane.
Turning back to her console, the ashushk clicked again, the throat flutter more agitated this time. “Setting a course for the stin station.”
Three active stations orbited Tau Centauri: human, stin and ashushk. There were more than three gates at the Hub, but only those three were active. The human gate terminated in human space, approximately two hundred thousand kilometers from the stin station. In theory, the Hub was a demilitarized zone. A sanctuary. Despite the recent peace accord, tension still existed between humanity and the stin, however, meaning the border between supposedly peaceful regions of space would be patrolled—by the AEF, the stin and perhaps the Guardians.
Ignoring the fear freezing his lungs, Felix completed his post-jump checklist and confirmed coordinates. Qek could have handled the entire operation herself, but he needed the distraction.
He turned to Qek, opened his mouth. No sound came out.
Qek clicked again, filling the awkward silence, then reached over to touch his hand. “Your reasoning is sound, Fixer. The stin will not fire upon us as we are unarmed. Our only concern is avoiding the AEF patrols.”
“What about the Guardians?”
“They have scanned our ship multiple times. It is marked and cataloged. They will recognize us.”
“How is it you have more faith in my plan than I do?”
“I have faith in you.”
That should have sounded reassuring.
Marnie poked her head through the open door panel. “Dieter just uploaded coordinates for AEF patrols at the Hub.”
“How—” Felix shook his head. “Never mind.” Any friend of Marnie’s would have several plays, and Dieter had already proved he had more than one deck in his hand. Felix turned to check his console. Several new contacts winked across the display.
“Adjusting our course.” Qek’s fingers slipped into a competent blur.
Felix waited for her to finish before examining their new trajectory. The zigzag path through space looked...ridiculous.
“They’re going to think we’re drunk.”