It’s ready when you are. I suggest you go sooner than later because another Kos soldier just fell.
I sprinted through the smoke, thinking invisible thoughts. Plasma pulses lit up in front of me but I didn’t slow down. A door loomed out of the darkness, close enough that I thought I would hit it.
The door slid open just as I was bracing for impact. Momentum carried me into the room, and agony arced up my spine as stun rounds slammed into my body. My muscles seized; I hit the ground and slid.
A trap. I’d just run face-first into a fucking trap. I couldn’t move my body, not even to speak, but the neural link still worked. Jax, please explain why there are two squads of Quint mercenaries in the room that supposedly held the Emperor, I said, my mental voice eerily calm.
Sorry, doll, he said. They pay better than you do. Though, to be fair, Emperor Kos really is in there with you.
When I get out of here, you’re a dead man, Jackson Russell, I promised.
His laugh echoed across the link. Good luck with that. Enjoy captivity, Queen Rani.
He cut the link before I could respond.
2
Two Quint mercenaries picked me up by my upper arms. My body dangled uselessly between them, caught in the thrall of the stun rounds. I recovered faster than most, but it would still be too little, too late.
I attempted a neural link out, but without Jax’s intervention, all of my attempts at long-distance links failed. Even my ship’s signal flickered in and out, and it was hidden nearby. The only steady link options were a few people in the room, but no way was I initiating a link with an enemy soldier.
The soldiers dumped me in a chair. They cuffed my hands behind my back, then secured them to the chair. They also secured my ankles to the chair legs.
I looked far more delicate than I was, which tended to make people underestimate me, but the Quint mercs weren’t taking any chances. Jax must have warned them about my augments.
That traitorous bastard was going to die slowly.
My head lolled on my neck and I left it hanging even as feeling crept back into my body. I needed every advantage I could get because I doubted the Quint mercs just wanted to share a nice cup of tea.
A man wearing fatigues and heavy boots stepped in front of me. He buried his fingers in the top of my braided hair and jerked my head up. He was older, grizzled, with reddish-brown hair graying at the temples. I didn’t recognize him, but that didn’t mean much. The Confederacy employed more people than I’d met in my lifetime.
“We meet at last, Samara Rani. The Rogue Queen—or is it the Scoundrel Queen?” he asked.
He seemed disappointed when I failed to rise to his baiting. I didn’t mind being called the Scoundrel Queen. If others thought we were just a bunch of rogues and scoundrels, the Rogue Coalition became a less appealing target. And anything that made others think twice before attacking us was okay with me.
“Doesn’t matter, I suppose,” he continued. “You walked in here like a lamb to the slaughter. You should’ve seen your face.” He laughed then leaned down to peer at me with a skeptical look. “Jax told us you were talented, but I’m not so sure. Maybe he wasn't talking about your intelligence, huh?”
I’d heard worse—much worse, delivered much more cleverly. I didn’t bother with a reply. Eventually he’d get around to why they’d grabbed me and then we’d be getting somewhere.
“Commander Adams,” a younger male voice said from somewhere behind me.
The man in front of me straightened with an impatient look. Now I had a name to go with his face. He didn’t know it yet, but his ass was mine. I smothered my smile.
“Sorry to interrupt, sir,” the young man continued, “but I thought you’d want to know the last of the Kos soldiers have fallen.”
Commander Adams flicked his eyes over my shoulder. A vicious grin tugged on the corners of his mouth. “Your men are dead, Emperor,” he said. “More lives you could’ve spared if only you’d cooperate.”
“And let you enslave the rest of my people? I think not,” a surprisingly sonorous voice responded.
Holy shit, Jax hadn’t been lying—the Emperor really was in the room with me. I resisted the urge to crane my neck around and look for him.
The commander sneered then turned his attention back to me. “Now, where were we, my dear?” he asked.
It took all of my considerable willpower not to say something provoking. I had no doubt that this evening would end in violence, but there was no need to hasten it along quite yet.
“Tell me about the Rogue Coalition,” Adams said, his hand still locked in my hair. When I didn’t respond, he tightened his grip until pain blossomed across my scalp. “We can do this the easy way or the painful way. Me, I prefer the painful way.”
His sneer made me itch to punch him. I wondered how fast his story would change if I freed myself. I very much doubted he would prefer the painful way if I was the one dishing it out—bullies didn’t like it when the tables turned.
“Does threatening an innocent woman make you feel like a man?” Emperor Kos asked.
I briefly closed my eyes. While I appreciated the sentiment, I would’ve appreciated it more if he’d kept his mouth shut. An angry man was an unpredictable man, and I needed Commander Adams to stick to the script: press me for details, try a little physical persuasion, and, when that failed, lock me up somewhere to recover until the next session.
Commander Adams’s grip tightened as he wrenched my head around. I could see Emperor Kos out of the corner of my eye. His dark hair was matted to his head and bruises shadowed a handsome face.
The Emperor had on a gray shirt and black pants, and he was secured to a chair of his own. Hopefully the Quint mercs had only inflicted superficial wounds or escaping would be more difficult.
Adams said, “This innocent woman is Queen Samara Rani of the Rogue Coalition and a criminal in her own right. She’s the very woman you yourself have a bounty on. Her pirates have stolen cargo from Quint and Kos ships for nearly a year. You should be happy someone finally caught her for you.”
Emperor Kos opened his mouth to respond, so I took drastic measures. “If you two need some privacy while you measure your dicks, I’d be happy to step outside,” I said.
Commander Adams jerked my head back and glared down at me. “Where is your ship?”
I gave him my most patronizing smile. “What ship?”
I saw the slap coming a kilometer away but couldn’t do anything about it. Pain blazed through my cheek and scalp as the sudden movement pulled against the hand in my hair. Even left-handed, the Commander packed a wallop.
“Where are the rest of your soldiers?” Adams asked.
When I didn’t respond, he hit me with a closed fist. I let the pain flow through me. I had his name; I had his face. I just had to endure until I could escape.
I mentally pulled back. When he hammered a fist into my stomach, it still hurt like a sonofabitch, but it was a distant pain.
I sighed in blissful relief when, a long while later, I slipped into the welcoming arms of unconsciousness.
I awoke to a cacophony of aches and pains. Commander Adams had worked me over, but he’d stopped short of inflicting debilitating damage.
My hands were still secured behind my back but now I was on my side on the floor. My left arm felt leaden, hopefully because I’d slept on it and not because my shoulder was dislocated or worse.
A soft sound nearby snapped me back to the situation at hand. I kept my eyes closed and feigned sleep. The air stirred as someone leaned over me. A hand touched my jaw and I struck, lunging up head first. My skull cracked against something hard and the person above me fell back with a deep groan.
I twisted around and kicked out with my bound legs. I hit something soft and the groan turned into a grunt of pain. Based on the timbre of the voice, it was likely a man, but all I could see were legs and feet outlined in greenish gray. We were in a pitch-black room but they hadn’t taken my contact lenses. I pulled b
ack for another kick.
“Queen Rani, stop, I’m not your enemy,” the man snapped. He rolled away and sat up. “Your breathing changed. I was checking if you were awake. Clearly, you are.”
A dark smear of blood ran from his nose. His face was bruised even more than before, but Emperor Kos was easy to recognize. Clean away the blood and bruises and the man would be gorgeous—the result of a millennia-long dynasty and the best genetics money and power could buy.
The Quint mercs had untied the Emperor’s arms. His legs were still shackled. He held himself stiffly, but that could be because I’d just kicked him.
Emperor Kos watched me with wary suspicion, proving he could see. His eyes didn’t glow with the telltale sheen of night-vision contact lenses, so he had some sort of augmentation, likely biological. People as rich as the Emperor didn’t bother with mechanical ocular implants.
“How long have I been out?” I asked as I levered myself up into a sitting position. The mercs had taken my belt and weapons but left me in the stealth suit and boots.
“Two hours, maybe,” he said. “Without being able to connect to the net, it’s hard to tell.”
I mentally reached for the net and came up empty. This room blocked all signals—I couldn’t even see my ship. Without the constant background noise of an active net connection my mind seemed too quiet, too still.
I had trained to deal with the abrupt loss of connection and could also disconnect for particularly delicate jobs. But for normal people, forcibly cutting off their net connection amounted to psychological torture.
“How are you, Emperor Kos?” I asked. “Any injuries I should be aware of?” Is the lack of a net connection making you crazy?
“Please, call me Valentin. I only have minor injuries so far, though I think you might’ve cracked a rib. Why are you here?” he asked.
“I’m here for you,” I said.
“My advisors hired the Rogue Queen to rescue me?” he asked skeptically.
“If you want something found in this universe, I can find it,” I said, dodging the question. “And you might as well call me Samara. ‘Queen Rani’ makes me feel far fancier than I am and ‘the Rogue Queen’ is a mouthful.”
“Did you lead my soldiers here to die?” he asked.
“No, they managed that bit of incompetence on their own. No one told me that Kos soldiers were attacking tonight. My mission was entirely separate.”
Pins and needles stabbed my left arm as the blood flow resumed. First things first, I needed my hands in front of me. Thankfully, these cuffs had a spreader bar designed to keep my hands separated to make lock picking more difficult. It meant I could slide my arms under my butt rather than having to dislocate my shoulder to pull them over my head.
It took some ungraceful wiggling, but I managed to get my hands in front of me. Emperor Kos looked far more impressed than the move deserved.
A look at the cuffs proved what I’d suspected—they were an older style that many units still used because they were harder to pick. Of course, the cuffs had been around long enough that people who made a habit of getting put into them had also had plenty of time to practice getting out of them, myself included.
I needed to have a plan before I took them off or the Quint soldiers would just slap me back in them. And a lot of that plan depended on how helpful—and useful—Emperor Kos would be.
“How long have you been here?” I asked. “Do they normally keep you in this cell?”
“I’ve been moved three times since they grabbed me. We’ve been here a little over a week. Last night was the second time I’ve been out of this room since we arrived.”
The light mental tickle of a waiting neural link took me by surprise. I glanced sharply at Emperor Kos who nodded very slightly. My neural link connection was protected by the strongest defenses I could buy or build and wasn’t open to unknown connections—he shouldn’t have been able to contact me without permission.
In fact, he shouldn’t even be able to see my link, much less connect to it.
I double-checked all of my mental firewalls, but I had a feeling that he was playing on an entirely different level. However, if we wanted any hope of escaping, neural link transmission was the best way to communicate secretly.
The link connected with an unusual burst of static. I’m encrypting the signal, Emperor Kos said through the link, to prevent eavesdropping.
Neural links were heavily encrypted by default, so he must be adding an additional layer of protection. The fact that he could—and thought that he needed to—made me question just how secure these links were in the first place.
The companies that handled the required brain implants guaranteed that their encryption was unbreakable. Now I wasn’t so sure, even though Jax had never managed to break the encryption and he was the best hacker I knew.
You sound like Emperor Kos, but one can’t be too careful. Touch your right eyebrow with your left pinky, I said.
He raised said eyebrow but followed my instructions. Samara, I told you to call me Valentin, he said.
I ignored the request. The intimacy of a first name made him real, made him a person and not just a payday. It was a complication I didn’t need.
My head throbbed. I rubbed my forehead and used the movement to pull a pin from my hair and palm it. I had pins sewn into the seams of my stealth suit, but if the mercs were going to make it even easier, I wasn’t going to complain.
I pulled my knees up and rested my forehead against them. The move was calculated to make me look small, harmless, and hopeless. It would also make it less apparent that we were linking.
I peeked at Emperor Kos. His frown smoothed out into a neutral expression when he caught me looking. So I wasn’t the only one plotting. How did you link without my permission?
State secret, he said with a grin. Even bruised and with a busted lip, his grin hit me like a meteor. I sucked in a surprised breath as unexpected heat pooled low in my belly. Can you get out of the cuffs? he asked.
The question returned my attention to thoughts of escape. Yes. How often do they check on you? Do you know anything about the guard rotations?
They turn the lights on in the morning and someone brings me breakfast. Some days Commander Adams tries to get me to talk, but mostly it’s just a random guard bringing food. Someone also brings me dinner. Other than that, the door doesn’t open. The lights go out at night, and there is a camera in the corner.
I couldn’t wait for the guards to open the door on schedule. They’d be expecting an escape attempt. Which meant I needed to provide them a reason to open the door early. Something urgent.
A plan began to form. It was risky, but everything was risky at this point. I let it simmer in my subconscious and started picking the lock on the left cuff. It was tricky with my arms wedged between my chest and legs, but it kept the cuff out of sight of the cameras. I returned to my questions.
“Any luck linking out while you’ve been here?” I asked aloud to keep the guards guessing.
Emperor Kos followed my lead. “I can’t connect even when the door is open.” He continued across the link, I tried last night but although the block was lighter, I’m not sure the message got out.
The mercenaries were being unusually careful with Emperor Kos. Most Quint mercs were hotheaded and impulsive, but this squad was a higher caliber. The Quint Confederacy wanted something from the Emperor. Badly. But what?
Whatever it was, they wanted him kept alive, which was ideal for me.
The handcuff unlocked. I left it around my wrist and carefully wrapped my arms around my legs until I could reach the lock on the leg shackle. The shackle was clamped to my ankle over the thin leather of my boots. I had to assume the guards were onto me at this point, so I moved quickly.
Do you have an escape plan? Kos asked.
Yes. It goes like this: step one, escape, I said. I didn’t add that step two was ransom him and step three was profit—he’d find that out soon enough.
I hoped fo
r something a little more concrete, he said. I tried to overpower a guard and got this, he pointed to his bruised face, for my effort. I think they are augmented.
I would be more surprised if the soldiers, especially the guards, weren’t augmented. It wasn’t an impossible situation, not quite, but it was far from ideal. We needed to escape tonight, while the mercs were still recovering from the Kos soldiers’ attack. If we failed tonight it could take days or weeks to find another opening to escape, time I didn’t have.
The leg shackled unlocked. Showtime. I let a good dose of crazy slip into my smile. Emperor Kos flinched back. “You thought I was here to rescue you,” I said. “That’s adorable.”
He frowned. “But—”
I cut him off. “Your brother sends his regards,” I said.
With that, I attacked.
3
I tackled the Emperor to the floor and pinned his arms with my knees. I clenched my hands around his neck and squeezed hard enough to block his airway. I hadn’t warned him because I needed his reaction to be real. It took him a second, but once he realized he couldn’t breathe, he began to fight in earnest.
What are you doing! he shouted at me across the neural link.
Keep fighting and don’t pass out, I warned. I let off just enough for him to grab a desperate breath then retightened my fingers. He writhed under me, trying to buck me off, but what I lacked in mass, I made up for in strength. I kept him pinned.
The door lock clicked open. A guard entered pistol first, but I was already moving. He didn’t expect my speed and his shot went wide.
I swung the heavy shackle still attached to my right arm and smashed it into his temple. As he fell, I grabbed his arm and turned the electroshock pistol on the guard behind him. She dropped like a rock, stunned.
Stun rounds meant they were trying to recapture us instead of kill us, which was a tiny bit of good news.
“Time to move, Emperor!” I yelled. He was still on the ground, gasping like a fish out of water. His legs were shackled and I didn’t have time to pick the locks, so I squatted down and pulled him over my shoulders.
The Queen's Gambit Page 2