His frame dwarfed mine, but my augments made me far stronger than I looked. Augmented muscles and bones barely flinched at the added weight as I stood with the Emperor draped across my shoulders.
I picked up the second guard’s plasma pistol and handed the Emperor the electroshock pistol. “Do you know how to use this?”
He nodded shakily.
“Shoot anything that moves,” I said. “Do not hesitate. And for the love of all that’s holy, don’t shoot me.”
I caught my ship’s flickering signal and opened a connection. I could carry the Emperor for as long as I needed to, but we didn’t have a lot of escape options. I directed my ship to remain cloaked but to maneuver closer. We’d have to risk a building-to-ship transfer because I very much doubted we’d be able to make the stairs.
I eased us out into the hall. A guard popped out from behind the nearest corner and I shot him on reflex. He went down in a cloud of red.
After two more turns, I knew where we were on the floor plan I’d studied. Our best chance of escape was from the balcony. We’d have to cross half the building to get to it, but it was still better than the three quarters of the building we’d have to cross to access the stairs.
Making a split-second decision I hoped I wouldn’t regret, I backtracked one turn. The rest of the floor had gone silent, a sure sign that the mercs knew we’d escaped. “Can you eavesdrop on the soldiers’ neural link?” I asked the Emperor. It should’ve been impossible, but someone who could see my link might be able to do the impossible.
“I’m not—”
“Yes or no?” I demanded.
“Yes,” he said, his reluctance clear.
“Do it. Loop me in if you can. If not, let me know what they’re up to.”
It took a few seconds, but Commander Adams’s voice filled my head, directing troops to various points around the floor. He was trying to surround us.
“They can’t hear you,” Kos said, “even if you transmit to me over the link. Your connection is receiving only.”
I opened a door on our left and was met with a wave of plasma fire.
Rani is in here! a soldier called across the link.
Don’t harm the Emperor! Commander Adams barked. He ordered two squads to converge on our location and another squad to cover the exits.
Time to move.
A peek around the door provided me with the soldier’s position. I ducked back and a plasma pulse slammed into the wall across from the doorway. So much for not aiming for the Emperor.
I counted to three, then rounded the door and shot the soldier in the head—he hadn’t moved. He went down with a look of surprise on his face.
I didn’t have time to gloat. I moved across the room and out the door on the far side. The Emperor shot at someone with a muted curse.
Rani has the Emperor, a soldier reported.
Find them! Commander Adams ordered.
Listening to the soldiers’ neural link, I avoided the squads heading our way and put some distance between us. With the exits blocked, we’d have to fight our way out. I needed the Emperor on his feet.
The next door I tried wouldn’t open. I stepped back and kicked it in. Emperor Kos grunted as I jostled him, but no one inside the room tried to kill us, so I chalked it up as a win.
Given a tiny reprieve, I set the Emperor down and started picking the lock on his right ankle shackle.
“Samara, my brother didn’t send you to kill me, did he?” Emperor Kos asked.
“Of course not,” I said. “But the fact that you believed he did says a lot about your family.”
“Oh, there’s no doubt he would if he thought he could get away with it. But I don’t think you’d take the job.”
The lock snapped open. I looked up and met his eyes. “Don’t paint me with a halo or you’ll be disappointed.”
A Quint merc peeked into the room. The next time she appeared, I shot her. The Emperor spun in time to see her slump to the floor. He turned back with wide eyes.
I pointed at the shackle still locked around his left leg. “Don’t trip on that, Emperor.”
He frowned. “My name is Valentin.”
It wasn’t worth the time it would take to argue. “Valentin, don’t trip on that and try to keep up.”
The smile he gave me for using his name nearly stopped my heart. I blinked at him, then shook myself out of whatever spell he’d cast on me and refocused on the mission. Escape, money, food—these were the only things that mattered.
Without Valentin’s body draped over my shoulders, I had more freedom of movement, but it also made me twitchy because I didn’t know exactly where he was. I found myself constantly looking over my shoulder to ensure he hadn’t wandered off or decided to shoot me in the back.
When I nearly shot him because he got between me and a Quint mercenary, I planted his left hand on my right shoulder. “Do not move this hand. You go where I go, duck when I duck, and turn when I turn. Otherwise I’m going to shoot you and all of this will be for nothing, understand?”
Valentin nodded.
We moved faster now that I didn’t have to wonder where he was. The Quint mercenaries were beginning to catch on to the fact that we were somehow listening in on their neural link. Their chatter quieted as the soldiers moved to other forms of communication.
I’d taken us on a circuitous route to the balcony so we avoided the main squads. My ship was in position. We just had to clear one more hallway and we’d be home free. Unfortunately, Commander Adams had realized we weren’t heading for the stairs and had redirected his troops.
And thanks to the radio silence, I had no idea how many mercs waited between us and the balcony.
I paused before entering the final hallway. I’d looted a second plasma pistol from a downed soldier, but that was the extent of my firepower. I’d kill for a grenade or seven, but so far, I hadn’t found any. Maybe Commander Adams didn’t trust his grunts with explosives.
“Why did we stop?” Valentin asked.
Because I don’t enjoy getting shot. I hadn’t meant to send the thought through the link, but by the way his mouth compressed, he’d caught it anyway. I needed to be more careful.
I crouched down and peeked around the corner. The hallway looked clear, but between us and the balcony there was a large room off to the right. The door was open. I couldn’t see in at this angle, but I didn’t need to. With my luck, it was packed with mercs.
The glass door leading to the balcony reflected the brightly lit hallway and obscured whatever lurked outside. If Commander Adams had managed to get here first, we’d be running blind into an ambush. But with our options dwindling, I had to risk it.
I sighed. I really did not want to get shot.
“We’re going to run for it,” I said. I clamped my left hand around Valentin’s right wrist. It meant I lost a gun, but I didn’t trust him to follow my lead.
“I can’t shoot left-handed,” he said.
“Do your best, even wild shots will help, but speed is most important. Whatever happens, do not slow down. Ready?”
I didn’t give him time to answer, I just pulled him into a run. Two meters before the open door to the room on the right, the world lit up with plasma fire.
I did not slow down. A pulse clipped my right shoulder but adrenaline blocked the pain. I shot the soldier responsible through the slice of the door I could see. He went down in a burst of pulses that gave me a tiny opening as the other mercenaries dove for cover.
I pulled Valentin into a sprint past the door. He jerked against my grip but didn’t go down. Hopefully he’d only been grazed or this escape was about to get even more dicey.
The glass door to the balcony loomed in front of me. I waited until the very last second to shoot the glass. I exploded through the door, covered in shattered safety glass. Valentin came through behind me, still tethered by my grip on his wrist.
I had the brief satisfaction of seeing Commander Adams’s surprised expression before I realized just h
ow many mercenaries crowded the balcony. At least a dozen men and women stood in a loose semi-circle facing the door. They all had plasma weapons trained on us.
Time slowed as training and instinct took over. I wasn’t going down without a fight, futile though it may be. And luckily for me, Commander Adams stood directly between me and freedom. Shooting him would be no hardship. I squeezed the trigger just as he shouted, “Fire!”
Three things happened at once.
Down! roared across the mercenaries’ neural link, accompanied by a blast of mind-piercing sound. The mercs dropped like marionettes with cut strings. Several released their weapons to clutch their heads and the rest looked dazed. Only a few managed to get off shots and all went wide.
My own shot sailed over Commander Adams’s head. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d missed a shot, but with the echo of the neural link noise still ringing in my mind, I failed to compensate for his fall.
Valentin staggered and went down. His weight dragged me to a stop. One look and I knew where the mystery shout had come from—he looked like hell. Fresh blood trickled from his nose and white pain lines bracketed his mouth, clearly visible even with the limited night-vision ability of my contacts.
He’d bought us some dearly needed time, but it had cost him.
“Up, now!” I shouted at him. I pulled him up and dragged him into a stumbling jog. I shot the opposing soldiers as fast as I could squeeze the trigger, aiming for the ones recovering first.
The plasma pistol clicked empty. I threw it at the nearest soldier, then we were across their line. The balcony’s edge was less than two meters away. I pulled Valentin forward, half carrying him.
The railing that would normally protect us from a fall was lowered to allow air taxis and ships to pick up passengers. The balcony extended beyond the side of the building. Below was nothing but twenty stories of dark, empty air.
Star-bright pain blossomed in my right thigh and my knee buckled. I gritted my teeth and threw myself toward the balcony’s edge.
Valentin balked, but my grip did not loosen. Momentum pulled me over the edge and my iron grip on Emperor Kos yanked him right behind me.
Together we fell into the open air.
4
For one weightless, terrifying moment I thought I’d miscalculated the jump. Then we passed through Invictia’s stealth field and the ship flickered into existence below us. In an impressively acrobatic move, Valentin jerked me close and used the momentum to spin himself beneath me.
I landed on him hard enough to hurt. I drew a gasping breath and pushed myself up, only to realize I was straddling him. I froze.
He grinned at me and not even the blood and bruises could disguise the interest in his gaze. Then he ruined the effect by bursting into a fit of coughing.
Shouts from above pulled my attention away from the man under me. “We’re going to move, so don’t freak out,” I said. I used my mental connection to the ship to direct it away from the building and bring up the shields. The soldiers shouldn’t be able to see us, and even if they could, the shields should protect us, but there was no reason to risk it.
The ship slid sideways as Valentin finally caught his breath. “We’re not dead,” he said.
“Not quite,” I said. I tried to ignore how good his body felt under mine. He was big and solid and warm and I needed to move before my brain took a vacation. I started to climb off him, but he gently stopped me.
“You knew the ship was here,” he said. “You should’ve told me. I thought you fell.”
I raised a brow at him. “Somehow I doubt you would’ve jumped into the open air on my word alone. Also, I’m not sure you want to get into a discussion of who should’ve told who what,” I said. “Because I seem to remember a certain someone taking out a dozen Quint mercs without lifting a finger.”
His mouth tightened but he didn’t reply. He touched my right thigh, whether to help me up or hold me in place, I’d never know, because he jerked his hand away. A dark smear covered his palm in my night-vision sight.
“You’re bleeding,” he said.
As if the reminder was all my body needed, pain blasted through the adrenaline fog. I swayed but covered it by rolling off Valentin. I pushed my abused body into a standing position. My leg wavered but held. I had about five more minutes without medical aid before I’d be down for the count.
“Let’s get inside,” I said. “There’s an airlock in the middle.” I pulled the Emperor to his feet and directed Invictia to open the hatch. I also directed the ship to shut down all outbound communication and block outgoing signals. I didn’t need Valentin calling for help just yet.
The airlock was a tight fit for the two of us, and I ended up practically in Valentin’s lap. This was the secondary airlock, only used in case of emergency. It wasn’t designed to be a main entrance.
My thigh blazed with white-hot pain at every movement, but eventually the airlock released us and we climbed down into the wide main hallway that ran from the bridge to the cargo area. Luckily, medical was nearby—and so was everything else.
Invictia was a tiny ship, one of the smallest capable of faster than light tunneling between galaxies. The bridge took up the front quarter of the main level. The middle two quarters housed the living areas. The captain’s quarters, the tiny crew bunk, and the crew head were on the starboard side. Medical, the galley, and the small rec room I’d modified into three holding cells shared the port side.
The aft quarter of the ship included a compact cargo bay on the main level and the stardrive, auxiliary engines, and primary maintenance area on the lower level. Other maintenance crawl spaces snaked throughout the ship.
I ushered Valentin into medical without giving him a chance to poke around. “Were you shot?” I asked. I bent over to pick the lock on the shackle still clamped to my left leg and black spots danced in my vision. I’d lost more blood than I thought.
“Just grazes,” he said. “You’re in far worse shape. What can I do to help?”
The shackle unlocked. I removed my boots and then started peeling myself out of the stealth suit. The stretchy material fought me every step of the way. “Trauma shears are in the drawer over there,” I said, pointing to the far wall. “Cut me out of this so I can dress my wounds.”
Valentin moved across the room with relative ease. Whatever he had done earlier had knocked him down but hadn’t done lasting harm.
Invictia was too small to have a proper medical diagnostic chamber and auto-doc. I’d have to make do with the handheld scanner and good old-fashioned triage until I got back to Arx, the Rogue Coalition’s headquarters on Trigon Three.
Valentin cut my stealth suit away until I stood in only my boy shorts and sports bra. My right side was coated in blood from my shoulder to my calf. Mostly I’d been grazed but the bastard who’d hit my thigh had gotten off a solid shot.
“How are you still standing?” Valentin asked.
“Practice,” I said, only half joking.
The plasma pulse had passed through my outer thigh and must’ve just missed the bone. A couple of centimeters to the left and we likely would not have escaped.
The medical scanner recommended a round in a med chamber, but since that wasn’t an option, I went with the secondary recommendation—cleaning and bandaging. The injury, for all it hurt like a bitch, wasn’t fatal, and the pulse had missed all of the major blood vessels.
I cleaned the wound, slathered it in renewal gel, then slapped on an elastomer bandage designed to mimic skin. Just to be safe, I also gave myself an injection of an immune booster and painkiller.
As the languid warmth of the painkiller spread outward from my thigh, I directed Invictia to take us off-planet. We needed to escape before the Quint Confederacy could send more mercenaries our way.
The painkiller knocked off the worst of my pain, but it also muted the adrenaline that had kept me going. The world went distant and fuzzy. My fingers turned clumsy and I struggled to reach the wound on my shoulder.
“Hold still and let me do it,” Valentin groused. I paused. I wasn’t used to relying on other people, but perhaps he was right.
With my hesitation, Valentin took over. His hands trembled as his own adrenaline wore off. He hid it well, but the close call had shaken him deeply. Near-death experiences tended to have that effect on people, but he was holding up better than I expected.
He frowned in concentration as he cleaned and bandaged my shoulder and other wounds. He treated me gently. Drifting deep in the painkiller haze, something very much like affection bloomed in my chest.
“All done,” he said a few minutes later. He looked me over. “You’re smiling. Does that mean you’re going to live?”
I met his eyes and again felt a jolt of desire. Maybe for one brief moment I could put aside the crushing weight of responsibility and just be a woman standing in front of an attractive man, celebrating the fact that we both were still alive.
“I’m fantastic,” I said. I buried my hand in the short, dark hair at the back of his head and pulled him toward me. His eyes were gray and wide with surprise. A tiny bit of doubt reared its head, and I stopped with a breath of space between us. Had I read him wrong?
He hesitated for an eternal second and then groaned low and pulled away. My hand hovered in the air for a moment before I remembered to drop it. Valentin started to reach for me but stopped the motion halfway. He ran his hands through his hair in frustration.
“I’m sorry. I can’t. You’re high on painkillers. You rescued me. I won’t repay that debt by taking advantage of you now.” He muttered something else, but my pride was too busy trying to recover to catch it.
Heat climbed my cheeks as the rejection finally sank in. Embarrassment burned away the pleasant haziness until I was left with only cold reason.
And reason said I was a fucking idiot.
I wasn’t just a woman, not anymore. I was a Queen with a plan—a plan thousands of people were counting on—and affection had no place in that plan. Kissing definitely had no place. Emperor Kos was a means to an end, and if I lost sight of that, I ran the risk of losing everything.
The Queen's Gambit Page 3