Dragon's Echo

by Natalie Grey

  “You’re right.” She nodded. “Both of you. I thought they were just fucking with me and we could ride it out. But we’ll find a way to take Tristan out—and whoever the hell he’s working for. Hey, for all we know we’ll get Estabrook at the same time, right? They worked together once, they might meet up again.”

  There was palpable relief in the room. Nyx met Wraith’s eyes and Centurion’s and nodded. “I’ll draw up plans from Foxtail’s report.” She met Foxtail’s eyes as well. “Choop, you keep us where we are for now, no sense going anywhere until we have a direction. Since I’ll be up anyway, I’ll take the helm tonight. Dismissed.”

  19

  Theoretically, it should be easy to catch Tristan. He had escaped in a small enough ship that neither scanners nor anyone watching had seen it, which limited his range. There were only so many ports of call within the range he had, and if they could get to him wherever he put down, they had a chance of heading off his next attack.

  Unfortunately, every piece of that was based on conjecture. He might have had a larger ship waiting for him nearby. He might have any number of resources they didn’t know about, including off-the-grid stations.

  She had to try, though.

  Nyx spread herself out in the cockpit with a stack of documents on the copilot’s seat and Foxtail’s report on her tablet.

  She found herself wishing she had looked at it sooner, and not just because of the information inside it. The report showed Foxtail’s character more clearly than any bio ever could.

  She was intuitive more than methodical, making leaps that Nyx could not always follow and then, when she came to a conclusion, finding information that Nyx would never have thought to look for.

  Nyx picked her head up, frowning. With everything that had happened, she and Wraith had never had their meeting to go over the crew dossiers. She made a note—in an increasingly cluttered personal calendar—and went back to the report.

  Tristan Mandekar was 32 years old and born on Seneca. This surprised Nyx. Despite the bustling cities and picture-perfect parks, she had never met anyone who had grown up on the planet that held the Alliance’s capital city. All the people she tended to see had come there from across allied space, hoping to come up through various branches of the government.

  At the age of 18, he had graduated from high school and had apparently never worked again. Where Nyx would have seen this and thrown up her hands, Foxtail had apparently taken it as a challenge. She’d found transport records, bank statements, and more. A man of Tristan’s description had been fitted for impressive implants … though they seemed to have been taken out again hastily.

  Nyx remembered Maryam Samuels’s mechanical body, and shuddered. Had she used her employees as test subjects for the procedures that would be done to her?

  From what Nyx had seen, the woman would have no qualms about that.

  Not for the first time, she found herself replaying, moment by moment, the assault on Samuels’s base. She had seen Samuels die once, or thought she had—but the woman had been so much more machine than human by that point that she’d survived her wounds. She had fought with superhuman strength, her bones made of metal, her joints augmented.

  Could she possibly have survived?

  No. Nyx had seen what was left of the base when it was done exploding. It was dust. The debris that was left….

  Well, she hadn’t seen every piece. She put her pen down and struggled to breathe. She had destroyed the station. She had killed Samuels not once, but twice, destroying even the cybernetic body, and then she had let the station blow up as Samuels intended. No matter what her skeleton was made of, what enhancements Samuels had, she couldn’t have survived that … could she?

  A message popped up on her system and she leaned forward to look at it.

  I love you. I know how hard your first command must be. Settling in with a new team sounds hard. Lesedi says Talon speaks well of them.

  I’ve written this message a few times now. I don’t want to send it, but I think I have to. Not sending it won’t keep everything from being real.

  I heard what happened at the docks and Victus. I was going to pretend I hadn’t, but I did. Lesedi thinks maybe Ghost isn’t dead, and the more I think about it, I think she’s right. It’s actually pretty simple if you think about it: she was all cybernetic, wasn’t she? So she uploaded her consciousness somewhere. I know people keep saying it’s impossible, but I don’t see why it should be.

  I don’t know if it’s really HER anymore. Philosophically, I mean—but I don’t think it matters.

  I think Ghost is still alive and she’s after you. Please be careful. I wish I could help.

  Just trust yourself. Deep down, you know what you have to do. You always do.

  Write when you can, okay? You don’t have to tell me anything about how things are going. I just like to hear from you.

  Love, Mala

  Nyx stared at the message. She took a long breath and then typed out her response, smiling despite herself.

  Mala—

  I didn’t know how to tell you about the explosion at the docks. I didn’t want you to worry. You probably guessed that.

  About Ghost—I think you’re right. I really wish you weren’t, but as you mentioned, you’re always right.

  YOU stay safe. Don’t do anything that will lead them back to you. That includes searching for information on them. I have no idea what they can find. Lesedi will know how to do things safely and she can help you if you have ideas of things to look at. You found Ghost when no one else could, you might be able to find her again.

  I hope I’ll have good news for you soon about that, though.

  I won’t do anything stupid.

  Love, Nyx

  Anyone on any of her crews would laugh themselves sick at that last line, but Nyx meant it. She wouldn’t take any stupid risks, she promised herself.

  Only calculated ones.

  She sat back in the pilot’s chair and stared out at the black. She should be reeling with shock about Mala’s revelation, but instead she was calm for the first time in days. She knew exactly why, too: Mala was right.

  On some level, Nyx had known it since that day at the docks—she had known it wasn’t just a taunt from one of Ghost’s associates, but instead a message from Ghost, herself. And whereas Ghost had been frustratingly elusive the first time she and Nyx had faced off, now Ghost had a weakness: she wanted to fight Nyx again.

  She wanted revenge.

  “I’m gonna find you, you bitch,” Nyx promised softly. “I don’t care how many times I have to kill you before you stay dead—that’s how many times I’ll do it.”

  And she was willing to bet Tristan would give her clues that would lead her to her quarry. She pulled the report back up and went to work with a will.

  Tristan appeared to be a negotiator, a deal-maker for Ghost. Foxtail speculated that he might have been friends with a congressional aide, and had caught Maryam Samuels’s eye then.

  And for 14 years, he’d been her experiment—so why was he still serving her? Nyx shook her head. There must be something she couldn’t see about Samuels. Who would serve someone like that willingly?

  The same sort of person who would serve Aleksandr Soras, even knowing what he was.

  She tipped her head back. She had helped train Mars and Camorra. She had known many of the people who were revealed to be agents—a few of the ones who had fled when Soras first went on the run, and the ones who stayed put as spies. She should be able to find common threads between them, shouldn’t they?

  Them, and Tristan.

  Unexpectedly, the thought that came to her was from one of the captains she’d served under in the Navy: Why, why, why, you’re always asking why. It doesn’t matter why they do it. It matters that they’re your enemy. It matters that I told you to kill them. It doesn’t matter why.

  Nyx had left the Navy in part because she struggled to follow orders that seemed to be given with no rhyme or reason. She had hate
d that captain, with her greying hair and a voice that was hoarse from years of barking orders.

  But right now, that reminder was what Nyx needed. Tristan was on the other side. She could find out why later … if she had time.

  And after he was dead.

  Foxtail had made a list of Ghost’s known holdings, and Lesedi had managed to find a manifest of the ships that had left Victus after the lockdown, some of which the Ariane and Conway should have seen.

  Maryam Samuels had been a senator, however. When it came to hiding ships and fooling Alliance technology, she had a leg up.

  One location, a power station situated between Crius and its sun, fell within the range of one of the ships that had left … and the details on its operation said that it was scheduled to ship a load of power cells out in a day and a half.

  If Tristan got on that cargo ship, he could as good as disappear—a registered cargo transport was hardly going to be on anyone’s radar, and with a hold full of power cells, the damage Tristan could do would be immense.

  If she cut him off, on the other hand, she could rob Ghost’s organization of that fuel and get Tristan to talk in one fell swoop. Nyx tapped her pen against the screen and then nodded and set the coordinates on the computer

  She took a deep breath and tapped out a quick message to Talon: Need to take out Ghost’s agent. Back on Rudolph’s trail when I can be. She typed the nickname with a bit of a pang. It had seemed so simple when they were planning it out, joking easily like old times.

  He must be at his terminal, because the message came back at once: Roger that.

  No recrimination. He understood.

  What had she expected? An angry rant? Of course he understood.

  Nyx shook her head at her own stupidity and began assessing the known qualities of the power station. She had just finished up when Maple came to relieve her. She had just enough energy left to send the first draft of her attack plan to Wraith, and then she went to her bunk and fell asleep without even showering first.

  She was still lying on top of her covers several hours later when she woke to the message terminal beeping at her and Wraith pounding on the door.

  20

  The alarm clock on the bedside table trilled cheerfully, and Talon picked it up and threw it at the wall of the cabin.

  Unfortunately for his present self, he’d had the foresight to buy himself an alarm clock that could withstand that sort of abuse. It hit the closet doors and bounced off onto the floor, still chirping energetically.

  “Goddammit.” He thrashed his way out of the mess of covers, tripped over some of them, and went crashing into the closet doors, himself. With a few muttered threats to whoever had designed the alarm clock from hell, he fished it out from under the bedside table and turned it off.

  Then he took the batteries out and held them up in front of it.

  “That’s right,” he told it. “I have the power. Me.” The message terminal beeped and he set the alarm clock and the batteries on the bedside table, pointing between the two of them. “Let’s just see you try to get those back in on your own.”

  He made his way over to the terminal and smiled when he saw Tera’s name on the screen. He opened up the message and leaned on the back of his chair.

  “Hey, there.”

  “Hey, yourself.” She gave an appreciative smile at his state of undress. “Did I wake you?”

  “Nah, my alarm just went.” He gave another glare at it. “I’m thinking of airlocking it. It’s far too cheerful.”

  She chuckled and took a sip of tea. “Lesedi says to tell you she’s found some messages between the rogue Dragons. It looks like they’re finally talking—like we thought they would a while back. My guess is they hoped you’d die on Victus and no one would care enough to keep going with things.”

  “They were immensely fucking mistaken, then, weren’t they?”

  “Yes.” She gave a smile that showed a lot of teeth. “Yes, they were. Now, the thing is, it looks like they’re not keen to team up. Two have sent cryptically worded messages that we’re guessing mean they’re just hoping to ride it out, and ours—that’d be Collette on Team 7, he goes by JD—hasn’t engaged at all yet.”

  “Any leads?”

  “Oh, that’s not a problem.” She gave a grin. “We know where he’s going—Calabria.”

  Talon whistled. “I don’t think we’ll be able to touch him—”

  “What is it with Dragons and the mob? You went after the Warlord and you think Calabria is some lost cause? No, we’ll get to him. He’s just keeping very quiet. Maybe he’s hoping that if he just sticks with the mob, no one will be able to find him again … or they’ve got him strung up by his ankles somewhere while they take all the information he’s got by force. In which case, we’d want to go double time on getting him out of there.”

  Talon frowned.

  “So he can’t betray Alliance secrets,” Tera explained. “Then we get his secrets instead, and we kill him.”

  “Oh. Yeah, that makes sense.”

  “I hope it’s just him leaving them to hang, though.” Tera frowned and rolled her neck, working out tension. “Because we don’t have a plan for how to get into the torture rooms on Calabria.”

  “Okay, I have to ask. How were you going to get onto Calabria in the first place?” Talon pulled the chair back and sat.

  “We took one of their shuttles—and, before you tell me about them deactivating the codes, we know that. We switched the signifiers on the shuttles. They’ve reported the wrong one missing.”

  Talon laughed. “And then what? Once you’re there….”

  “Have you noticed that no one ever pays attention to maintenance workers?”

  “Yes.” He was beginning to grin.

  “We nab our guy when he goes to take a piss,” Tera explained.

  Talon started to laugh. “That’s evil. I love it.”

  “So do I.” She tapped a few keys and his terminal beeped again. “I sent the messages for the other three, though. You and Nyx might have some luck with the stuff from Estabrook.”

  “Just us,” Talon said. “Team 9, I mean. She’s got someone to take out on her end before rejoining us.”

  Tera fell silent for a moment. He’d kept his voice neutral, but she could always read him. “You all right?” she asked finally.

  “Yeah. Should’ve sent her after them from the start.”

  “Except you’re not her commanding officer anymore.”

  “Right.” He shook his head. “Except that. Hard habit to break. Anyway, she’ll probably be done with that and back before we find Estabrook. The man could be anywhere. At least she has some sort of a lead. When are you all going in?”

  “Soon.” She panned the camera down to show combat gear, elegant and deadly.

  “Do the maintenance workers on Calabria generally carry multiple weapons?”

  She laughed. “I’ll change before I get there. We’ll be heading out in the shuttle soon, though, and no communications from there—don’t want to take the chance of some piece of code we missed tracking everything.”

  “Good call. Catch you when you’re done.”

  “Hopefully we’ll both have good news and we’ll be 2 for 4 on those bastards.” She blew him a kiss and signed off.

  He grinned and went to pull on the first shirt and pants he found. Without Nyx around in her usual uniform, his appearance had gotten a great deal sloppier. Aegis might have objected … if he didn’t have so much fun giving Talon crap for it.

  Talon was at the door of the living area when the proximity alarms went off. He frowned and made for the cockpit at a run, arriving just as his personal comm unit buzzed.

  “There’s a—oh.” Jester turned as Talon ducked into the tiny space. “Though you were asleep. There’s someone on our scanners and—fuck.”

  The proximity alarms transitioned to the wail of an impact alert. Jester jerked the yoke hard and the Ariane banked. His fingers danced over the keys as Talon slid into the
copilot’s seat to begin arming weapons of their own.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck…” Jester was swerving, enabling the automated set of jags and turns that would help a ship evade auto-targeting. With the calibration systems on guided missiles being so finely calibrated, human reflexes wouldn’t be able to turn the ship quickly enough to get out of the way.

  The first few maneuvers worked. The missiles shot past the ship and began to turn. Decoy buoys dropped out of the Ariane’s wings, deployed by Jester, but the missiles ignored them. They had honed in on the Ariane’s system and whatever they were, they weren’t distracted by the Alliance-made decoys.

  Not a good sign.

  Footsteps pounded along the metal walkways and Tersi’s voice echoed down the hallway. “Suit up?”

  “Yep,” Talon called back. He didn’t bother with anything more. His eyes were on his screen, tracking the missiles and getting ready to launch his own. He waited as the missiles came into range and fired.

  One was taken out cleanly, but the second evaded his countermeasures and he launched again, cursing. The second set of countermeasures worked, but with the explosion so close, the Ariane shuddered.

  Jester winced and Talon shook his head.

  “I don’t like doing that to our girl.”

  “Better than a direct hit.” Jester hauled them around to look at the other ship for a moment, snapped a still image, and then climbed to shoot over the top of the other ship. When it altered its course, he put on a burst of speed and swore as he swerved around the nose of the other ship and back down on a diagonal path. “Fuck, they’re fast. They should not be able to maneuver that way.”

  “Heads up, they’re coming around hard. Send that readout to the Io with an urgent message.”

  “No time.” Jester hauled on the yoke again and winced when the impact alerts started back up. “How many missiles?”

  Talon looked down at his screen and swallowed. “Full spread.”

  He felt himself go cold. He could not waste time thinking now. He deployed a full set of the decoy buoys Tera had programmed for them and began to arm a spread of his own. They had two objectives now: get out of the way of the missiles, and take the ship down before it could fire any more.