by Calinda B
She switched her hazer to her free hand to give it something to do that wouldn’t embarrass her while she peered around the alley corner to the wider street. “We could get to the port via back routes, but the main road is faster. We’d be better served by speed. Assuming no one else is looking for you. How much trouble are you in?”
Torash glowered around the wayward strands of dark hair peeking out from her drawn-up hood. “What makes you think we are in any trouble?”
Shaxi raised one eyebrow. “We just shot our way into a back alley.” She directed the look at Morav. “And I recognize the smell of trouble.”
Alolis huffed out a breath. “I smell like flowers.”
Even more baffling than the physical response to Morav—what were all these emotions?—Shaxi found herself smiling at the blonde girl. “You’ll have to share your secret with me.”
“Then it wouldn’t be a secret,” Torash snapped.
Morav flicked one finger in the air to silence them. “The main road. No one is looking for us. Torash, Alolis, keep your hoods up and walk ahead of us. Not too fast, but don’t linger.”
“The window shopping in Levare leaves something to be desired anyway,” Torash said archly.
If Morav was at all amused by the girls’ antics, he hid it behind a curt, “Go.”
Shaxi missed the musicality in his accent. And then she realized how ridiculous that was. She needed some distance. “I’ll take position across the street, pace you.”
“No, I want you next to me.”
She pursed her lips at the suboptimal formation then shrugged. She’d never disagreed with a direct order.
They let the girls get about a half block out, skirting the hunkered-down buildings, before they followed. What had been an eye-catching group with the girls in their pink robes and their bristling bodyguard was now just gray figures hurrying to their destinations ahead of the late-afternoon winds that were whistling a menacing tune along the ragged rooflines.
Morav touched his comm link again and murmured something before passing along, “Jorr is shadowing us from the parallel alley.”
“Did he leave bodies?”
“No deaths. Once the girls are away, the…ah, desire for…mayhem fades.”
Shaxi remembered the way Torash had eyed the drunk and whispered, “Dream of me,” and the way he had fallen back when even the toxic-tasting local drink hadn’t done him in. She did not think that man’s inner mayhem would fade anytime soon.
“The girls,” she said. “What are they?”
“Let’s start with who you are.” His lowered voice shivered through her, not with the unnatural power of Torash’s vocal trickery, but some equally undeniable urgency.
“You recognize my insignia,” she hedged. “So I don’t need to explain, I’m no one.” Not anymore.
For no reason she could comprehend, she had to steel herself against a twinge of disappointment when he didn’t disagree, only gave a brusque nod.
“So you are not in service now?” he pressed.
Annoyance sharpened her tone. “As I already said, and I thought the whole universe was aware.”
“Then what shall I call you? Since the Hermitaj base was destroyed, I assume your coded designation is no longer valid.”
“I was called Shaxi…before,” she said. “I have recovered that name for identification purposes.” No need to explain how the word had drifted up like a lone bubble from the murk of her altered brain as her Hermitaj enhancements glitched.
“Shaxi.”
The lilt to his tongue gave the name more grace than when she said it, and the intimacy suddenly felt more dangerous than a half-dozen hazers lighting up in a closed space.
“Shaxi,” he said again, brusquely. “I am Eril Morav, auxo of the sheership Asphodel, currently and unfortunately parked on this thrice-tangled moon. Why did you come to our aid?”
“You offered to pay,” she reminded him. The need for it rankled more than the sand in the joints of her armored jacket. Was this what she’d been reduced to? Haggling for credit when she once served on a strike force of the most feared mercenary fleet in the sheerways?
“You stepped in before that,” he noted. “Why?”
“I saw a need.”
“But if your Hermitaj coding is no longer functional—”
“I still have one mortal eye,” she snapped. “I would not stand by while innocent girls were assaulted.” At least she wouldn’t for the time being. When her own desire for mayhem became too strong… Well, the shriving was coming.
He studied her sidelong. “Of course not,” he said finally. “Who could just stand by when they see such a threat?”
Something baleful in his tone made her hackles rise, but she didn’t bother responding, directing her furious stare at a rusted runabout angled across the street ahead of them. Her muscles tightened. It would be a good spot for an ambush.
But they passed without incident.
She longed for the connection to Hermitaj’s central processing core. If she still had that, she would already know everything that existed about the Asphodel, what the mysterious girls were, and who Eril Morav was.
Because she did know one thing. He was no simple auxiliaries officer of some random cruiser. Not with the company he kept, that unknown gun, and those enigmatic, vigilant eyes.
She might have shot her way out of a tight spot, but she wondered if she’d just found herself in deeper trouble yet.
Chapter 2
Until the fight in the cantina had ended almost before it’d begun, Eril Morav thought the time had come to kill the twins.
Their power was expanding exponentially, as the day’s adventure had proven. Though his research indicated their influence would become more focused after their initiation, there was almost nothing to prevent possible catastrophe before then. It would only take one over-amorous suitor to blast their protectors to oblivion and expose the twins’ power to the wrong people.
People like himself.
But unlike some others, he would make it quick and clean, and the universe would spin on, ignorant of the ruin washed away in the blood of two guiltless but not innocent girls.
No one was innocent, and no one was above sacrifice.
Least of all himself.
He almost hated the cyborg mercenary for her interference. If Shaxi—or so she called herself—hadn’t disrupted the attack, he could have engineered a suitably convincing massacre: a beleaguered bodyguard overwhelmed by would-be lovers swept away by their irresistible attraction to the last unbonded l’auraly in the universe.
Before he’d been given this mission, he’d thought the l’auraly were beings of legend. And though their existence had been proven to him beyond a doubt, he still would’ve been inclined to disregard half the science and all the mysticism that pervaded l’auraly lore.
Except it was true.
Infused with an empathic crystalline substance in childhood, at puberty the l’auraly became beacons of sensual desire. The qva’avaq in their bodies resonated with a matched “key” crystal, allowing a unique physical and mental bond between the l’auraly and their a’lurily—the patrons who paid unspeakable credit to take ownership of the vanishingly rare l’auraly.
Since he’d joined the Asphodel’s crew, Eril had seen the yearning the crystal evoked—an overpowering fusion of lust and adoration. Fortunately, his awareness of the qva’avaq’s influence gave him a certain immunity.
The fact that he was the vile assassin sent to kill the girls only increased his resistance. Still, he wondered what it must be like to fall headlong into such a purity of sensation…
But that was not relevant to the mission on any level. He’d been given this task, and he would complete it, as he had all the others he’d been given. Today on this misbegotten, half-changed moon, he’d seen his underwriters were correct, and the threat proved too great.
There were dangerous people in the universe. Some were predators, through and through, but some didn’t ev
en realize what a menace they were. But still their seemingly innocuous choices could ripple through the sheerways, knotting—or severing—the life threads of everyone around them.
He knew it. And he bore the scars, lest he ever forget or even falter.
If this new potential threat—Shaxi, of the pretty, unfurling gun and cold, dark eyes—had not risen up, he’d have taken the opportunity to kill them, and then this would all have been over and done.
As done as any possible claim to what remained of his tattered soul.
She was an unpredictable variable. He hadn’t encountered many Hermitaj automatons over the years. They worked in circumstances that demanded shock troops, large explosions, and high body counts. His missions were confined to the shadows. But he’d passed them, coming from or going to the same battlefields, and while he understood their place in the hierarchy of killers, he’d always been vaguely repulsed when he caught sight of their identical, blank visors—and the identical, blank eyes behind.
Or maybe his revulsion was because he’d caught a reflection of himself in that blankness.
Though she was stripped of the intimidating exosuit that was a Hermitaj trademark and clad only in padded combat fatigues, Shaxi still had the height and musculature of a warrior. The shocking white of her short hair corkscrewed out in all directions, even more shocking against her dark skin, which glistened in the sapping heat. Fine traceries of scars mapped both her temples and the side of her neck as well as the backs of her hands; some remnants of past fighting, he guessed, but some the result of the modifications that had made her a Hermitaj commando.
He wondered how she had survived, separated from her unit and from the directives that kept her fighting as long as she was alive.
His curiosity was purely academic. She was an anomaly, and until he could factor her in, he wouldn’t take any rash action.
He paced her in silence, keeping watch on the l’auraly twins and listening to Jorr’s updates on the route ahead as they made their way toward the spaceport.
Although terraforming on Khamaseen had been cancelled when the costs of exploiting its mineral reserves proved too high, Levare would’ve provided services for a wide array of sheerships. It had been sized accordingly, so the half-finished spaceport resembled the carcass of some exotic behemoth. Still, it provided the basics: repairs, supplies, sexual congress for valid credits, and the like.
The port was almost empty because of the approaching storms. Most ships were off-planet or battened down in closed bunkers, but the Asphodel rested at one berth. Her six angular landing struts and four powerful thrusters—angled for immediate departure—gave her the look of a sleek predator that had brought down the behemoth. If by design she had once been a light pleasure cruiser, enough modifications had been made by her captain over the years to resurrect her as something else. Even Eril didn’t know the extent of her capabilities.
And he’d been looking. But his spying was circumspect by necessity. The Asphodel’s captain had been a soldier who’d survived a planetary atrocity wreaked by his own superiors. Not surprisingly, the betrayal had burned distrust into Corso Deynah more profoundly than his scars.
The pristine—and false—dossier the underwriters had created for Eril Morav had gotten him onto the Asphodel mostly because Deynah seemed to prefer loners and misfits on his ship, and Eril’s manufactured history held just enough truth to make him seem one of those. But the welcome had not extended to the inner circle. The captain and his mistress—Benedetta Galil, a l’auralya herself—ran a proverbial and literal tight ship: anyone who knew about the destruction of the last qva’avaq crystals had either left the ship or wasn’t talking, not even to the simple, affable auxo who kept their mess hall operational and their air filtered.
But the Asphodel, for all her enhanced engines and cleverly masked weapons systems, could only run so far, and eventually he would unveil her secrets.
As if they sensed the weight of his deadly attention, the twins hastened toward the sheership, their sand-robes flapping around their knees to reveal the pink. Eril closed his eyes to block out the sight. Sometimes it was hard to pretend to forget they were barely more than children.
He sensed movement and snapped his attention back to Shaxi.
She had edged to one side, her hazer covering their path. Jorr appeared at the end of the berth.
“Any followers?” she asked when he approached.
Jorr straightened, responding to her clipped authority as if she had some right to question him. “I circled twice. Nobody behind.”
She holstered her gun. “Levare has, at best, half a proper security contingent, and they’re also responsible for storm preparations. If they bother you—and I don’t think they will—you should be able to explain this away as an unfortunate misunderstanding with the addition of proper contributions to the civic coffers.”
“Maybe half a proper contribution?” Eril gave her a sardonic quirk of a smile, one that usually worked on susceptible beings. After all, she might be an orphaned cyborg mercenary now, but she was still female. More or less.
She looked at him without returning the smile. This close, he could see the ring of hammered gold surrounding her black irises: a mark of her cyber-embeds. But despite that striking embellishment, her dark eyes were as flat and emotionless as they’d been from the moment she’d entered the cantina, looking around, her gaze passing over him as he was always careful to make sure gazes did.
Had there been one moment—when the twins were working their genetically and molecularly enhanced magic—that a spark of fire had appeared in those lightless depths? If so, it had guttered out, leaving not even a remnant of wistful ash.
“When you say half, I hope you are not intending to renege on the promise of payment you made to me,” she said.
He lifted one eyebrow. Hermitaj commandos were known for two things: their relentlessness in battle and the unassailability of their purpose. Once their mission was paid for and programmed, they did not deviate. They could not be bribed or begged from their target, and recompense went to their superiors, not to them.
How comforting it must be to cede responsibility for their actions. Bitterness churned in his chest, but he swallowed it down. The killer in front of him no longer had that consolation either. Whatever her anonymous assigned designation had been before the eradication of Hermitaj, she had lost that protection. No more sanctioned segregation from culpability, no more post-strike memory wipes. And no more unlimited credit line, apparently.
He shucked off his sand-robe, careful to fold the inner pocket over his arm, trapping his second comm and his hazer out of sight. He’d intended to use his trip to the cantina as cover for sending an update to his underwriters, but the twins’ arrival had interrupted him. “I don’t have the authority to pay you—” When her mouth flattened in irritation, he raised one hand to forestall any complaint. Or hazer fire. “Benedetta Galil—the girls’ sister—will reward you handsomely, I swear.”
Shaxi shifted from one boot to the other, her armored jacket creaking with dust. The telltale mark of uncertainty seemed incongruous after he’d just watched her pick off her targets with unflinching precision. “Then I’ll speak with this sister. Now.”
When Shaxi had first drawn her hazer back in the cantina, Eril had wondered for a split second if she’d been sent to take the twins. His underwriters had warned him there were other players in the game, whose intentions were even more dire than his own. But there was no flicker of recognition or triumph in her face at hearing the name of her target, and her obvious discomfort at approaching her new benefactor convinced him she was not a sly assassin creeping in the dark. Like himself.
Oh, she was without doubt the sort who might shoot him, given the need, but he would know the kill was coming. If only for one last heartbeat.
Maybe half a heartbeat.
But since she was not another assassin and she was no longer a Hermitaj commando, perhaps she could be something else: a tool for him.
With the tilt of his head, he indicated the cargo bay hatch where the twins were enfolded in the embrace of another woman. “This way. I’ll tell Benedetta of the good turn you did us, and I know she’ll be properly appreciative.”
This time—maybe it was the promise of payment—the hard set of her jaw softened, and she gave him a small, polite dip of her white head. “Then introduce me.”
He held out one hand to usher her ahead of him. When she only looked at him askance, he lowered his hand, a flush creeping up the back of his neck. Why had he done that? She was not one of the pampered young debutantes he had squired around when he’d been a boy. It had been the word “introduce,” he guessed, as if this were just another day on just another planet.
Rather than a secret war being waged for the freedom of the sheerways. A war in which the unsuspecting twins were both the enemy and the victim. And the weapon.
Which made him both savior and killer.
If he had half a heartbeat before Shaxi ended him, he might have just enough time to thank her for setting him free.
Chapter 3
Shaxi did her best to ignore the looming man beside her as she walked toward the sleek sheership. But Eril Morav was harder to ignore than a plasma grenade with its countdown light flickering faster toward extinction.
When he’d taken off the sand-robe, he’d proved her right: he wasn’t wearing armor to bulk up. The broad expanse of his chest was encased in a close-fitting vest, the rich russet material highlighting the auburn strands in his dark hair. The vest left his arms bare, a concession to Khamaseen’s heat, and exposed a pitch-black swirl of markings over the muscled curve of his shoulder. The arcing lines of the tattoo were precise, almost delicate, seeming out of place on such a big man, and her fingers twitched with the inexplicable desire to trace the design over his bicep, to see how far it continued across his chest. She wondered what the emblem meant to him, because already she knew he was not a man who did anything without reason.