Shades of Dark

by Linnea Sinclair

  “Why?”

  Silence. A shrug.

  “Is it painful? Disorienting?” I remembered Sully accessing the Kyi’s powers on Marker. It tired him, drained him of energy. But that hadn’t happened lately.

  He moved his gaze down to his folded hands. “It’s addicting,” he said finally. “I told you.” His voice held a harsh note and he looked at me, his expression blank, almost bleak. “I can do more than listen. I can control. That’s how a zral—a zragkor—works. I can put thoughts in their minds and those thoughts become their own, the same way I showed you the scanner unit just now. You accepted everything I sent. Immediately. I could have sent you the command to put your gun to your head and press the trigger. You would have done it, without question. It’s that easy.”

  He turned his face away and focused on that distant galaxy on the wall.

  “But you don’t do things like that,” I said gently.

  “The only reason Gregor and Aubry are still alive is not that I don’t do things like that, Chasidah. But my damned drunken stupor blocked what I wanted.”

  But those were extenuating circumstances! “Sully—”

  “You asked what I wanted to do about Gregor and Aubry. I’ll tell you what I want. Do not, under any circumstances, let me near them. Because this time I will kill them. And it will not be slow, pleasant, or pleasurable, in spite of all the crap you’ve been reading about Ragkirils.”

  Fear. I don’t know if it was his or mine, but I felt it, and the Grizni bracelet around my wrist tingled in warning. The woman named Chaz wanted to march out the door. The woman who was Captain Bergren held her ground. I can’t say I’d faced worse fears, but I’d faced enough. And running away only made them surface again at some later date.

  It took a few moments of heavy, tense silence. Then, sadness. Sorry. Lately I excel at being an ass.

  I shook my head. “Do you remember what you told me on the Loviti? That the hand that caresses can also kill? I know you feel different as a Ragkiril, but you’re not. I’ve spent my life working with fully armed crew members, any one of whom could have shot me in the back without warning. They didn’t. A gun or a Ragkiril’s mind still needs the desire, the intent, to push that trigger.” I hesitated then grabbed onto something he’d just said and turned it back on him. “Stop letting that crap you read about Ragkirils define you.”

  The stiffness left his shoulders. Slowly, he turned his face toward me. “Do you have any idea,” he said quietly, “how much I love you?”

  The undisguised emotion in his voice and on his face made a small lump form in my throat. My voice was husky when I answered him. “Enough, I hope, to keep talking to me. Keep being honest with me. Even if you think I won’t like what you have to say.”

  He reached for my hand and brought it to his lips, then closed his eyes, his mouth warm against my fingers. “Beyond measure,” he said finally. He released my hand. “Go zap those snoopers, angel.”

  “Dorsie’s anxious to see you. She’s been in a culinary frenzy. I hope you’re hungry.”

  He gave me a small smile. “Give me a minute, then send her in.”

  “You have five,” I told him as I squatted down, then picked up his robe’s sash from the floor. Rising, I wound it into a ball, then tossed it against his bare chest. He grabbed it as I turned for the door. “And put on a shirt. It’s bad enough how she ogles Ren. I don’t need her fantasizing about you too.”

  I looked back to find his grin broadening.

  “The best way to a man’s heart—”

  “—is one clean shot from a Stinger, point blank, set to kill,” I said, tapping the pistol on my hip. Then I ducked quickly, darting into the corridor as the balled-up sash whizzed by my head.

  I zapped three red snoopers. The first one was in the galley dining area, where I sent a gleeful Dorsie up to see Sully with a large covered tray of things that smelled awfully good. The second was in the corridor just outside Ren’s door. Gregor’s paranoia over abilities Ren didn’t have. The third was on the bridge.

  Marsh had come on duty. “Fucking piece-of-shit slag-head.” He slammed his fist against the back of the empty pilot’s chair. “I never liked him, never trusted him, not since the day Dorsie and I came on board. Slimy bastard. Even Fleet didn’t want him. Oh, sorry.” He glanced sheepishly at me, remembering I was something else Fleet didn’t want.

  “No offense taken.” I waited until he was out of arm’s reach of the chair before I slid in. I brought up ship’s course and speed. Less than eight hours to Narfial and the next data beacon. How would Marsh feel when he found out his boss was a Ragkiril?

  For a moment I considered telling him. The entire crew had been through a lot. Too much. It didn’t seem fair to have one more thing sprung on them, one more thing to tear away the trust they’d had as a working unit committed to a common goal. In Fleet, we’d have called a general crew meeting by now. There was a need to know.

  But this wasn’t Fleet.

  “Aubry,” Marsh was saying, “now he was always a little strange, but he never bothered anyone. He did what he was told and he did it well. It wouldn’t surprise me if Gregor blackmailed him into helping. That would make more sense than his turning against Sully like that. I mean, Sully’s a real prince. He does everything for us. All of us.”

  Marsh stopped and wiped one large hand over his mouth. “I’m not supposed to know about the money he’s sent to my family on Umoran. Every now and then, I hear about this unexpected deposit that shows up in my mother’s account. Once it was even a new enviro unit for the house. Truck pulls up, says here you go, Miz Ganton, drives off. Brand new. Top of the line. Better than the governor has, I swear.

  “Sully doesn’t know I know. Don’t tell him.” Marsh looked at me. “But that’s not why I stay with him. It’s not bribery. It’s Sully. What he is, what he does. He’s just always there. He’d die for us. I know that. We all know that. Or I thought we did.” He shook his head sadly.

  I headed back to the ready room, my mind sorting through the variations of Gabriel Sullivan: mercenary, philanthropist, pirate, teacher, monk, poet, mutant, lover, friend. A man at odds with his world and himself. A man who would die for his friends—if they didn’t kill him first. A man who loved me enough to risk the most intimate link that could be shared between lovers. A man who loved me enough to send me back to my ex-husband in order to keep me safe from harm—and from himself.

  Ren raised his face as I entered and pulled his headset down around his neck, partly obscuring the faint lines of his gill slits. “Not sleeping, I take it?”

  I shook my head and sat. “Researching Ragkirils, from what I caught a glimpse of. But he knows he needs to rest. I think he will. Plus Dorsie was bringing him a feast. Any surprises from Gregor?”

  Ren sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose with two fingers. “The good news is I don’t see anything that could have been in Sully’s confidential files. Except for that first unit, which seems to be old data, it looks like Gregor simply copied anything he could over the last four months. There appears to be no pattern. It was quantity over quality. That leads me to believe he didn’t initiate this, but rather was acting on someone else’s instructions.”

  “Like the thief who steals the imitations along with the gems.”

  “Using that analogy, he took everything, including the furniture. I don’t think he knew what he was looking for. But whoever was to receive this would.”

  “And whoever was to receive this has gotten data on Sully before,” I said, not liking what I was hearing at all.

  “That’s my guess. But there’s another problem.” He hesitated. “I used the visualizer to examine these units. It’s not a perfect method, but it’s the only way I can do it. I need you or Sully or Marsh—if you trust him—to look at them. I don’t think they’re from the same manufacturer Sully usually uses.”

  “They’re not from Pops, you mean,” I said, naming the affable, bald-headed man whose ship’s supplies and repair se
rvices Sully had used for years. I’d met him and his daughter—who ogled Sully much in the same way that Dorsie ogled Ren—on Dock Five. Sully trusted Pops implicitly. And Pops knew Sully was also Ross Winthrop.

  “Pops may well carry these units. I just know they’re not ones Sully buys.”

  “That would make sense. If Gregor used ship’s inventory, it would show archivers as missing. I’d guess the Farosians supplied him with these.”

  “They’re not of Tos Faros manufacture,” Ren said. “That much the visualizer confirmed.”

  I picked one up. I’d seen dozens of archivers in my career. This was a nice, sturdy unit but I couldn’t see anything remarkable about it. “So whose are they?”

  “I was running searches on that when you returned. If these units are indeed Vadny-Vier archivers, they’re sold mostly in Baris and Aldan. Two of the largest customers in the past five years are the Englarian church—I recognized their procurement office codes—and Guthrie Global Systems.”

  I sat very still. “That’s crazy. Why would the Englarians care what Sully was doing? He was helping them, sending medical supplies to their clinics on the rim!”

  “You forget the church is now split, Purity and Reformed. Drogue is Reformed. But Purity still upholds the necessity of beheading all Ragkirils. For the most part, it’s done symbolically in temple services, but I’ve heard talk of a radical movement. A violent one. They’d be after Sully not as a Ragkiril—I doubt they’d know—but because of me. Or his friendship with Trel.”

  I thought of Sister Berri Solaria, certainly one of the more violent Purity Englarians in the empire. I could easily see her commanding a warship, had she lived. I didn’t think she knew Trel, the Stolorth bartender on Dock Five. But she’d hated Ren.

  And then there was Guthrie Global Systems. Philip—but it wouldn’t be Philip. Admiral Philip Guthrie was the anomaly in his family. He hadn’t followed his siblings and cousins into the moneyed business careers that made up the conglomerate known as Guthrie Global Systems—which was Empire-wide, not just global in scope. I knew very little about Guthrie Global. Sully would know more.

  And Sully would love to prove Gregor had been hired by my ex-husband.

  “We need to know who else Gregor was working for. And Aubry.” I couldn’t discount him.

  “Sully can find that out.”

  “Sully,” I told Ren, “specifically states he won’t do that.”

  Ren tilted his head slightly, regarding me quizzically with his sightless silver eyes.

  “He told me he won’t be able to stop himself from killing them. And not nicely,” I said quietly.

  “He doesn’t really mean—”

  “He does.” I ran my hands over my face. “Ren, whatever’s happening to him is tearing him apart. He doesn’t trust himself. He’s even mentioned sending me back to Philip for my own safety.”

  “Then we have serious problems, Chasidah. These archivers that Gregor had: three of the five are copies. The data you decoded showed embedded transmission date headers. Two were sent just before we left Dock Five, but the last Aubry sent out right before Sully found Gregor and Aubry in the bay. We never thought to block Aubry’s transmits. Whoever received those knows what ship we are, who’s on board, and that we’re scheduled to dock at Narfial.”

  “It has to be the Farosians. They already intercepted us.”

  “That interception was in Gregor’s data. The full audio feed as well. I don’t think the Farosians pay to be informed of what they already know.”

  No, they wouldn’t. And each archiver had finite data storage space. An audio feed ate up a lot of that. So someone else was following Sully. Someone who would pay to know the Farosians were too.

  The possibilities were legion. But it kept coming back to three: Tage and Burke; a radical, violent movement in the Englarian church; or the Guthries, who’ve been studying Ragkirils for decades and just might like a rare human specimen. Dead or alive.

  “You’re going to have to convince Sully to probe Gregor and Aubry,” Ren said quietly, “or we may find a very unpleasant and unexpected problem waiting for us at Narfial.”

  Sully had put a shirt on. Black long-sleeved thermal shirt, black pants, boots. Weapons belt holding his Carver-12 hanging at an angle around his waist. He’d shaved and was clearly on his way out—back to the bridge, engineering, ready room, somewhere—when Ren and I stepped through the opening door into the captain’s quarters.

  He looked up in surprise, then his face blanked.

  “No.”

  I didn’t know if he was reading Ren or me. It didn’t matter. He knew why we were there.

  I grabbed his forearm and dragged him away from the door, back in the direction of the couch. I had no intention of conducting this conversation within earshot of the corridor.

  The remnants of Dorsie’s ministrations were stacked on the galley counter. Three large plates, all empty. A bit of brown gravy and a crust of bread were all that was left. Sully had always had an amazing appetite.

  “You inhaled that in record time,” I said.

  He ignored my comment. “No, Chaz. I can’t. You know why.” He switched his gaze to Ren, who leaned against the edge of the desk much as I had earlier. “You do too.” His voice hardened. “I shouldn’t even have to explain this to you.”

  “Dorsie went to a lot of trouble to cook all your favorite dishes,” I said. I still held on to his arm. I gave it a little shake, bringing his attention back to me. “And I’ve just spent forty minutes on the bridge, listening to Marsh sing your praises. You owe it to them, to keep them safe.”

  “Not that way.” He slipped his arm out of my grasp then ran one hand through his hair. “If nothing else, I’m not 100 percent yet.”

  Wonderful time for him to admit that, yes, he should still be in bed.

  “We have a few hours—”

  “Sully.” Ren cut into my offer of more time, echoes in his voice of a river rushing relentlessly downstream. “Gregor sold out to more than just the Farosians. This is our problem.”

  Sully’s hand dropped down from his hair, his eyes snapping to black, taking in Ren, taking in me. Suddenly my brain felt as if it were a comp system on maximum download. Images, information whipped through—all of Gregor’s data, things I didn’t even remember reading, the tiny Vadny-Vier logo imprinted on the archivers, Marsh’s words: He’d die for us. Nayla Dalby’s voice. The red snooper, blinking in Dorsie’s galley. And more. Berri Solaria’s angelic face. Philip’s worried frown. The article on Ragkirils from the West Baris University professor. Then Gregor’s colored-coded list. And the embedded time stamps showing transmission of the data.

  “Fuck.” Sully turned away and strode for the bulkhead viewport.

  I didn’t realize I was wobbling until Ren grabbed my elbow, steadying me.

  “For someone who’s not 100 percent, you sure did that easily enough,” I said, anger vying briefly with amazement.

  Sully made a fist against the viewport. “You’re ky’sara to me, Chasidah. It’s impossible for you to say no, to block me.”

  All that I am is yours. The phrase surfaced from memory, not from Sully. And it just took on a whole new meaning.

  “Gregor and Aubry,” Sully continued, still facing the big wide darkness beyond, “will fight it. Gregor especially. He’s been around both Ragkir and Ragkirils in Fleet. You saw his transmits. He’s tried to learn more, especially blocking techniques. Not that they’ll work.” He shook his head then angled around toward me. “Remember when I read Guthrie in your brother’s office? He knew. He tried to block me. Idiot. And I wasn’t even half then what I am—” He stopped, lips thinning.

  What are you now? I wanted to ask but didn’t. He probably heard the thought, anyway. And I knew he didn’t know the answer.

  “If you need to rest for an hour, then do so,” Ren said. “But it appears our assumption that Gregor and Aubry were running to the Farosians may be in error. And that error could cost lives. The Purity Brig
ade is not something to trifle with.”

  Sully stared at us. “We don’t know it’s them.”

  “Exactly,” I said, meeting him stare for stare.

  A tense silence filled the room.

  “Fuck,” he said again, softer this time. He shoved his hands in his pants pockets and dropped his gaze to the floor, then brought it up. “Let me think about this.”

  “If you want me there to act as if I’m doing the probe, I’m willing,” Ren said.

  “You think I give a damn that Gregor finds out what I am? He’s not going to remember shit when I finish. But I can’t risk that I might—” He stopped, lips thinning once more. “Things could go wrong. Very wrong.”

  “Nothing went wrong when you did the zral on Kingswell and Tessa Paxton,” I reminded him. When we’d hijacked the Meritorious from Moabar Station, Sully had erased the memories of our presence from the two officers on board. Except for some disorientation and a block of time that would never return, they were fine.

  “And if the zral I try on Gregor turns out to be a zragkor and I kill him? Can you live with that, Chasidah? Can you live with me? Damn it all, woman. I don’t know if I can live with me!”

  I turned from the pained expression on his face to Ren. “If you’re there, can you balance him somehow? Hold him back?”

  “If he’s there,” Sully said harshly, before Ren could answer, “I could kill him too. He’d be linked to me, Ragkir to Ragkiril. It doesn’t matter at that level that he’s blind. If what’s in me views him as a threat, just the mere act of thinking about pushing him away could kill him.” He sucked in a deep breath. “Do you understand now?”

  The Grizni bracelet tingled around my wrist. Fear had filled the room, an almost suffocating sensation. And it was coming from Sully, centered on Sully.